SWNSC snowshoe trails expanded!!!!!

Thanks to all those who came out to help with our trail maintenance weekend!! Lots of stuff done and all that help in effect freed up some time for our main guys to work on yet another snowshoe trail addition. Thanks to hard work and persistence of Paul Gr. to find and mark this trail and all the people who helped him complete the marking, laying out and cleaning it out. Huge group effort with hours and hours of volunteer time with an amazing trail for all as payoff. Thanks everyone! If you wish you could've helped or want to enable us to do more of this, please click here to donate! We are 501c3 now, so your donations is tax deductible!

Great description of the new trail addition below from Clay including link to map:

Well, it's beginning to look a little bit more like winter is on its way, and with that, the Southwest Nordic Ski Club has been ramping up its volunteer trail work.

Something that we've been planning and now actively doing is developing a "real" snowshoe trail system. This new "trail," which is really just a cleaned up corridor that we've found & scouted out over the past few years, is located below the Canada Bonita road (or FS Trail 282). The corridors through the dense forest were presumably cut by surveyors years ago, but never really cleaned out. They had just cut what they had to in order to complete a survey. We have found a few relics of the survey(s), including marks on trees, some nailed-in tags, etc.

Anyway, we've been slowly cleaning out the extremely dense downfall and brush to get a very nice path put in. This is not like the other trails that the club has developed over the years with the purpose of groomed xc skiing in mind, but rather a more up-close-and-personal contact with the natural state of the forest and existing terrain. This new section is absolutely amazing and everyone should go up and check it out, either on snowshoes when the snow flies, or even now. It is a very hikable/passable corridor that is a bit more adventurous and natural than the other trails up there.

Refer to the Nordic Ski Trail Map that was put together by our very own Lynn Bjorklund at the Forest Service (thanks for the great map, Lynn!). You'll see the "railroad tracks" trail symbol off of the lower multi-use trail (before and at Point-R, what we call "Paul's Portal") that denotes the portion of snowshoe trail we had gotten in for last season -- a trip out the "overlook" is a must, btw.

We've cleaned up that bit of trail even more, and finally scouted out and [mostly] cleaned up a long corridor all the way out on that somewhat flat "shelf" below the Canada Bonita road; it is now passable all the way out to Points-P and -O, with exits at those points and also at Point-R. We put up some flagging to keep snowshoers (and hikers) on the right track, but really, it's quite obvious because it's basically the only passable corridor through the dense forest there.
You can go see it for yourselves, but traveling through there is a special experience that I highly recommend. I was making a sweep of the entire length of the corridor and went from the "overlook" out to Point-O and realized I went from an open old-growth, fire-recovery ponderosa/aspen/locust forest, to a very dense, wet, mossy, dark spruce/fir forest in less than a mile. Intermingled in there were the amazing variety of deciduous trees that were lighting up the dark greens of the conifers. Travel through there and you'll see what we've been talking about.
We hope you all get out to enjoy it!