Sunday, October 31, 2010

New trailwork posting from Clay

Spent most of the day cutting out downfall with Orion Staples. We cleaned out the lower road and hacked our way through the snowshoe trail...again. It's clear through there, if not a little rough and not as neat as it was before the wind storm. The stuff that came down near the intersection out at point O made it a bit messy through there. But, we were also able to improve some of the other sections that we didn't have very clean before, so it's probably nicer as a whole.

Interesting thing happened while we were cleaning out the snowshoe trail: we actually heard another big aspen fall down on the lower road. We found it later and cleaned it out.

After getting the lower road clear out, we went up the R-to-B connector (cleaned it out) and started hiking up the upper trails, finding trees down every couple of hundred meters. Many things down on TJ's and Dave's. TJ's had a huge [still live] tree come down, but fell in a very fortunate direction (makes the trail look entirely different there now). There is a massive root ball that peeled up a large section of trail that we'll need to go reclaim with the Pulaski/axe/shovel/saw. The hole left by the root ball is impressive. Orion got pictures on his cell phone -- one with me down in the bottom of it below the root ball. There's also one other tree that I think Pete Stilwell cut part of when he cleaned out the E-to-P connector, but still needs a couple more cuts to clear out of the trail's full width. We skipped it, as we were running out of time and needed to go see the rest of the damage.

At J, we found a huge mess, or two actually. We did our best to clean out the first one, but there's still a lot of boughs on the trail. There's another big cluster mess above J. The old big dead trees were all breaking off near the tops and brought other stuff down with them. There's another down tree at J itself that needs another cut, but my [brand new] chain had finally had enough after cutting out more than 20 trees.

Further up, we cleared out what we could without a saw, but there's a couple more places that need some cuts: one near the first short cut, and one at almost Point-K. There's some stuff that came down on the side of the inner meadow trail (below L heading to M) and is in need of trimming back too. I noticed a big Doug Fir that fell out in the meadow island of trees about where the meadow trail might track. It's worth looking at closer.

Closer to home, there's a green spruce tree down just beyond Point-A. It's a pretty small cut.

That was ONE HELL of a wind storm. It brought down a lot of stuff, not only into/across the trails, but more out in the surrounding forest. I could see many places where clusters of trees had come down and changed the characteristics of what things looked like. All things considered, I think we got fairly lucky. Two big trees came down right next to our trails but fell such that we didn't have to clean them out except for a relative little. Point-J still needs some work, though. I sure hope this cleared most of the weak stuff out so that it doesn't happen during the winter.

If you're looking to do a little evening trail work, take a trip up to Point-J (among those others)and get after it. Looks like dry, warm weather for the next several days. Some parts of the trails are quite muddy after last week's snow; around point-L, there was still some lingering snow and icy trail.


Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Donate to SWNSC THIS WEEK and have your donation matched by LANS!

Hey everyone,

This is for our members/friends/suporters who happen to work at Los Alamos National Lab. Since we are now a 501c3 organization, LANL employees who donate to the club can have LANS match a portion of that donation if they hurry up and contribute through the LANL Employee Giving Campaign.

This ends this Friday Oct 29th, so you have 2.5 days left to do it. Please do it now if you can!
Last year the match was $.76 for each dollar donated.
To get the match employees need to enter their donation through the time and labor system.
Select United Way of Northern NM (they will charge 14% processing fee), donor designation “Nordic Club” and the official address for the Club. (Southwest Nordic Ski Club, P.O. Box 1556, Los Alamos, NM 87544)

Dont forget campaign ends this Friday!
Also, (and Friday deadline doesnt apply to this part) LANL employees who volunteer for the club need to log hours on Volunteer Match. All volunteers who give more than 100 hours, LANS will contribute a donation to that organization on behalf of the volunteer.

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!

Trail Work Weekend recap


Photo courtesy Dave K.
  Yet another great weekend up in the Jemez Mountains. By all accounts, the SWNSC Fall Trail Work Weekend was a success.


So many folks chipped in and basically adopted a section or two or three...and got after it clearning the brush, aspen shoots and etc. to make things ready for the ski season. Snow or no, it needs it every year so that it doesn't get too overgrown.

I think with all of everyone's efforts, we got almost all of the tree sections cleaned up. There still may


Tarik biking in water etc for group camping Fri night.
be some work to do on TJ's, but I need some confirmation on that -- we were all so scattered all over the system doing different things, that I didn't get a chance to see it all once we were done. We were also able to get the steel poles set out and ready to be pounded in for the fencing setup. We managed to get a few of them put in before running out of time. We also got the trail counter installed, so we'll hopefully be collecting some numbers on the amount of traffic in and out of there.




The snowshoe trail system is going to be amazing this year with the additions scouted and partially cleared out by Paul and Tom. There needs to be some clearing work on it still to get it ready, but once that's done, it'll be something everyone will need to go take a look at.

The chainsaw class, put on by Miles Standish from the Santa Fe National Forest Espanola Ranger District, was very informative and provided very good instruction for those of us "self-taught" amateur sawyers who basically "hack" our way through the job of clearing out the dead-fall that plagues our trails every year. Some of the safety points were new for us, as well as the various strategies to tackle tough clearing jobs. Thanks to the FS (Miles) for coming out and working on getting us officially certified on our volunteer agreement.



Along with the usual SWNSC members who always energetically show up, we had a number of new faces out there who dove right in and got their hands dirty with the trail work. We even had some 75+ yr old Finnish volunteers, courtesy of Sanna Sevanto, who wrangled her visiting parents into coming out for an entire day of brush and aspen shoot cutting. They showed us how it is done and got a lot of work accomplished!





sun coming into the work group camp
 Our Albuquerque folks also made the trip up, with John D., Beth, Dave K. and Daryl D. pitching in and also camping on Saturday night. A few people came from Santa Fe as well.

Speaking of which, the camping was also a great time, with four of us the first night, and a whole bunch more the second. It was pretty cold on Saturday morning, but that night, the moist air moved in and made Sunday morning a bit warmer, if not a little more damp. Very nice experience waking up to the sunrise in the meadow and just basically being right on the trail for a weekend.


photo by Dave K.
 A big thanks goes out to all of you who came out. I was a little bit under the weather, so I didn't get around as quickly as I would have liked, but it sure looked like everyone got a lot done. We'll have more to do from now 'til the snow flies -- hanging up the fencing, clearing the snowshoe trail, cleaning up the meadow sections (they also get aspen shoots and a lot of errant branches and rocks), etc. If you have some time, consider taking some shoot cutters or go pound in some steel fence poles on the front hill!

photo by Dave K.
 See you next time. We'll probably have another shorter day or two in November to get the rest of the things done.
 
Big thanks for the great photos to Dave K. More photos from the weekend on our homepage photo gallery tab.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Ski Postural Conditioning Classes in Los Alamos Oct 25-Dec 9th

Hey locals!  Jessica of alignedplay.com who has been a SWNSC member and sponsor for a long time, is offering the following ski postural class:

Ski Postural Conditioning Classes


Description

Develop snow sport specific strength, flexibility, cardiovascular fitness and balance all with attention to proper posture and function. It is the body that you bring into the downhill, snowboarding and cross-country skiing experience that influences your risk of injury and can enhance or diminish your efficiency of movement while carving turns, striding up a hill or maneuvering the bumps.

October 25th-December 9th, 2010 (no class Thanksgiving week)

Time: 5:45-6:45 PM

Days: Monday and Thursday

Monday class will be strength, stretching and balance exercises, please bring a yoga mat

Thursday class will be a challenging circuit of full body and ski specific movements

Location: Unitarian Church in Los Alamos

Monday class - Hearth Room

Thursday class - Robinson Hall

Cost:

Both nights (12 classes): $72

One night (6 classes): $48

Drop-ins: $10/class

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Trail Work Weekend Recap

Here's the final from Clay Moseley. It's the largest and best attended trail work day(s) in the club's history, thanks for coming out!

"Yet another great weekend up in the Jemez Mountains. By all accounts, the SWNSC Fall Trail Work Weekend was a success.

So many folks chipped in and basically adopted a section or two or three...and got after it clearning the brush, aspen shoots and etc. to make things ready for the ski season. Snow or no, it needs it every year so that it doesn't get too overgrown.

I think with all of everyone's efforts, we got almost all of the tree sections cleaned up. There still may be some work to do on TJ's, but I need some confirmation on that -- we were all so scattered all over the system doing different things, that I didn't get a chance to see it all once we were done. We were also able to get the steel poles set out and ready to be pounded in for the fencing setup. We managed to get a few of them put in before running out of time. We also got the trail counter installed, so we'll hopefully be collecting some numbers on the amount of traffic in and out of there.

The snowshoe trail system is going to be amazing this year with the additions scouted and partially cleared out by Paul and Tom. There needs to be some clearing work on it still to get it ready, but once that's done, it'll be something everyone will need to go take a look at.

The chainsaw class, put on by Miles Standish from the Santa Fe National Forest Espanola Ranger District, was very informative and provided very good instruction for those of us "self-taught" amateur sawyers who basically "hack" our way through the job of clearing out the dead-fall that plagues our trails every year. Some of the safety points were new for us, as well as the various strategies to tackle tough clearing jobs. Thanks to the FS (Miles) for coming out and working on getting us officially certified on our volunteer agreement.

Along with the usual SWNSC members who always energetically show up, we had a number of new faces out there who dove right in and got their hands dirty with the trail work. We even had some 75+ yr old Finnish volunteers, courtesy of Sanna Sevanto, who wrangled her visiting parents into coming out for an entire day of brush and aspen shoot cutting. They showed us how it is done and got a lot of work accomplished!

Our Albuquerque folks also made the trip up, with John D., Beth, and Dave K. pitching in and also camping on Saturday night.

Speaking of which, the camping was also a great time, with four of us the first night, and a whole bunch more the second. It was pretty cold on Saturday morning, but that night, the moist air moved in and made Sunday morning a bit warmer, if not a little more damp. Very nice experience waking up to the sunrise in the meadow and just basically being right on the trail for a weekend.

A big thanks goes out to all of you who came out. I was a little bit under the weather, so I didn't get around as quickly as I would have liked, but it sure looked like everyone got a lot done. We'll have more to do from now 'til the snow flies -- hanging up the fencing, clearing the snowshoe trail, cleaning up the meadow sections (they also get aspen shoots and a lot of errant branches and rocks), etc. If you have some time, consider taking some shoot cutters or go pound in some steel fence poles on the front hill!

Be sure to check out the pictures on the SWNSC photo album (follow the links from the website).

See you next time. We'll probably have another shorter day or two in November to get the rest of the things done."


Clay


Monday, October 4, 2010

FREE Skiing and Posture Workshop

Jessica of Alignedplay.com is a long time SWNSC member and sponsor. Check out this free ski posture/alignment class from her:
Ready for the snow? It's coming...there was at least two inches of hail on the top of the ski hill yesterday. To help you prepare for the cross-country ski season I'm offering a free workshop where you'll learn how being in good posture alignment can improve your skiing performance, lower your chance of injury and alleviate chronic pain.

Monday October 18th

  • Time: 5:45-6:45 PM
  • Location: Unitarian Church in Los Alamos
  • Cost: FREE!
  • Reserve Your Spot: contact me
Invite your downhill and snowboarding friends, the discussion will be applicable for all snow sliding enthusiasts!