Today’s hike was going to be an interesting one – First, I was going to meet a potential new hiking partner and second, we were planning to do some major work on the Cottonwood Meadows trail. I knew it would probably be pretty buggy, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was fearing it might be.

We met at the Ripplebrook store about 8 and decided to do a shuttle hike. This makes maintenance a bit easier since you don’t have to lug stuff back uphill. We chatted for a bit and then headed to the lower trailhead to drop a rig. The only downside to shuttle hikes is setting them up takes a bit of time. It takes a half hour or more to get between the upper and lower trailheads. By a little after 10:00, we were at the upper trailhead. We geared up and headed down the trail. The trail immediately needed help as the very beginning is (was) VERY brushy with huckleberries. Oliver brought his wireless hedge trimmer which works GREAT on all those huckleberry bushes. While he was doing that, I forged ahead and started cutting logs off the trail. There were more logs than I remembered from last year, and some of them were quite a big bigger than I remembered as well. A gas saw would probably have been more appropriate but I did quite a bit of work with my electric saw. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a lot of photos – we were too busy doing work. I also neglected to bring my flagging tape – I had wanted to flag the entry and exits to the meadows as I remembered the old flagging that was there was falling down. I also really wanted to lop and flag a route thru the cut area so we can have a better route thru there. Needless to say, since I forgot my flagging that did not get done.

We did a lot of work down to the first meadow – cutting back LOTS of huckleberries (it looks better in person than it does in the picture):

Cutting logs off the trail:

And generally just picking up the tread. We eventually made it down to the first meadow:

Since the meadow had a lot of standing water in it, we had to walk around the meadow. It took as a bit to find the exit on the far side of the meadow (there was no flagging), but once we found it we continued our work on the far side of the meadow, cutting back huckleberries and cutting logs off the trail. We got to the unmapped road that crosses the trail east of the first meadow and decided it was time for lunch. The bugs were kind of bad there, so we walked up the road looking for a place where they might not be as bad. We found a spot that had a slight breeze and didn’t have any standing water nearby so the bugs were definitely better there.

We ate lunch and then went back and continued down the trail, continuing our brushing and logging work. On the way down to the lake (the second meadow), we ran into a HUGE mess of trees – there were probably 10 trees – it looked like one came down and it created kind of a domino effect and brought down a bunch of others. We cleared all the logs except for one large one – before we started you couldn’t even tell where the trail went. After we got done you could follow it again. I really wish I would have gotten a before and after on that area – it was a HUGE improvement.

After cleaning up most of that mess, we continued down to the lake, continuing to clear logs. I think it was about at this point where my last battery gave up. It was getting later in the day as well, so we pretty much put away all the maintenance tools and just started hiking. We got to the lake and had to scratch our heads a bit for where the tread was – it is pretty indistinct in places here, especially where it goes back into the woods. This will need some refinement at some point in the future. We finally got back on good tread and continued past the lake, thru the small wet areas (which were mostly dry) and down to the third meadow just above the 240 spur.

At this point, the trail stops since everything south of the 240 spur was cut. This was where I wanted to start lopping and flagging a route but we were running out of time and didn’t have any flagging, so we just headed out. We went over to the island of uncut timber and started there and made our way south. We took the path of least resistance but today we ended up going a bit farther north than I’ve gone in the past. We stayed more in uncut areas and we wandered thru a few of these really cool cedar groves with some pretty large cedar trees

We soon made it to the end of the 270 spur and then out to the 265 spur which brought us down to the last segment of trail. We followed it to the end of the road and continued down. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the work Kirk and I did last year was still holding up well. When we were here last summer the trail was impassable due to all the rhodies and vine maple in a few spots. We cut that all out and it was still in good shape. There are a few spots that could use a bit more trimming but overall it wasn’t bad.

We soon got back on real good old tread. We followed it down and at one point, Oliver noticed an old junction. I can’t believe I’ve never noticed it before but he was right – it was pretty distinct tread heading south towards Lake Harriet. I looked at some old maps and I think it might have gone down to/near Lake Harriet – here is a snippet from the 1938 map (the pin is the waypoint I set):

After that interesting discovery, we continued down the trail and finally got to the bottom. We drove back up to the top and then said our goodbyes. It was a GREAT day in the woods. We didn’t get as much done as either of us had hoped but my recollection of how bad the trail was was wrong. I didn’t remember all those logs, or remember how BIG some of them were. I also didn’t remember it being quite as brushy as it was. I think we got almost all of the logs (except that one big one) and brush to the second meadow – almost a mile. We still need to flag the route thru the cut and finish the rest of the trail, but that is a project for another day.