The Ansel Adams Wilderness Project brought six volunteers into the Shadow Lake area for five days of backcountry trail restoration. Youth volunteer Thomas Zentmyer came along for the community service hours, but went home with an experience he’ll remember forever. Check out his words below, and stay tuned for more stories and photos from the trip. “I’m a frequent visitor to the backcountry, but this trip had scenery like I had never seen before. I would come back from a hard day of work and settle down for dinner, all the while surrounded by the sound of gushing water, golden…
Julia Runcie
Thanks for all your hard work yesterday, Troop 350! The Convict Lake boardwalk is looking great. High flows this summer left rocks and debris piled up against the boardwalk at the head of the lake. Troop 350 was able to clear a fifty-foot section of boardwalk so water can flow under it again! The boys were especially motivated by the challenge of removing several huge logs that had gotten jammed underneath the boardwalk, causing sediment and boulders to pile up around them. No logs were left by the time they were done! Thanks, Troop 350!
Just outside of Bishop, Pine Creek Canyon offers some of the best rock climbing in the Eastern Sierra. It’s also critical habitat for a herd of about a hundred endangered Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep, for whom the steep walls provide protection from predators and a migration corridor between their summer and winter ranges. Today, representatives from Friends of the Inyo, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Access Fund, the Inyo National Forest, and the local climbing community met to install an informational kiosk at the canyon’s main climber parking lot. This sign will help teach visitors about the…
Another youth group from the summer adventure camp Rustic Pathways joined us last weekend to clean up the Upper Deadman campground and clear brush on the Lundy Canyon trail. They loved the Lundy waterfall and were even brave enough to swim in the snowmelt! Thanks for the help, Rustic Pathways. See you next summer.
Watching the students’ ecstatic faces as they raced toward a muddy patch of snow on the Tamarack Bench trail, you might have thought this was the highlight of their summer. But the chance to lob pine-needled-filled snowballs at their counselors was just one of many bright moments during a weekend of trail stewardship with the youth adventure programs Rustic Pathways and Road Less Traveled. One student from New York City had never seen the stars before they appeared above her campsite on Crowley Lake. Several others hiked above 10,000 feet for the first time in their lives. For some, finding a robin’s nest…
The iconic scenery of the June Lake Loop was the perfect background for a morning of stewardship last Saturday. A partnership between Friends of the Inyo, June Lake Trails Committee, Mono County, and the Inyo National Forest, the eighth annual June Lake Trails Day brought together 36 volunteers from as far away as Reno and Arizona. Volunteers tackled a variety of projects on popular trails, from pulling weeds, picking up trash, and repainting signs along the Gull Lake trail to crosscutting fallen trees on the Yost Lake trail. Steep trails like the one to Fern and Yost Lakes are very…
At the head of the Bridgeport Valley, Twin Lakes is the gateway to a spectacular corner of the Northern Sierra. Climbers, skiers, backpackers, fly-fishers, kayakers, and campers visit the area and travel its trails. This year, we were excited to partner with Mono County and the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest to host the first annual Bridgeport Trails Day at Twin Lakes. Twenty-four hardy volunteers pitched in to pick up trash and fishing line, crosscut downed logs, brush the Cattle Creek trail and the Lake trail, and disguise illegal switchback cuts along the Horse Creek trail. In all, we maintained nearly 12,000…