Crew 2: Justus Mountain Relocation
working with Georgia Appalachian Trail Club
click here for the full photo album
It’s June now, and another Konnarock crew week has come and gone. Week 5, to be exact. As Konnarock nears the halfway point of the season, another tale of trail building triumph can be recorded in annals of history.
This week, Crew 2 took its furthest drive yet - approximately six hours south to Justus Mountain, near Dahlonega, GA. Partnering with the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club, Crew 2 prepared to begin the final campaign on completing the Justus Mountain Relocation.
The relocation has been several years in the making, and although the new trail section was officially opened earlier in the year, some finishing touches remained to be put on.
Most of these final improvements consisted of additional rock work - namely the addition of base steps to most of the stone staircases on this trail section. Base steps, buried almost completely beneath the ground at the base of a staircase, serve to provide an insurance policy against future erosion, while also stabilizing the entire staircase.
Besides the base steps, several new steps, with accompanying gargoyles, had to be installed. In addition, a wet, muddy seep area had to be mitigated, and a spot where a large stump was leading the trail to widen and creep downhill. Finally, a protruding hump of rock had to be removed from one trail section to reduce a slipping hazard. To address this area, the Milwaukee Hammer Drill and accompanying portable generator had to be hiked into the field.
The crew was smaller than average, with just three volunteers plus the two crew leaders. Luckily, GATC members turned out in considerable numbers to bolster the ranks of the crew. Thanks to the teamwork between Konnarock and the club, work accelerated quickly beyond the initial expectations for the project.
Base steps were installed rather rapidly, with a team of hardy individuals pounding rocks into gravel-sized crush so that all steps could be appropriately locked into place. Of course, the creation of solid, sustainable steps requires the use of some enormous rocks, and the crew members worked together to move and set these massive objects with a mix of teamwork and the invaluable rock net. It didn’t take long before all the base steps were done and other projects could commence.
One of these latter projects was the construction of a small section of rock crib wall to harden and raise the tread where hikers had been forced to hike downhill by a protruding stump in the middle of the trail. After reducing the height of this stump with a combination of chainsaw and pulaski action, the real work of building the structure began.
It quickly became apparent that if the area was to be made sustainable, a considerable amount of work was needed to locate and move massive, more-or-less flat and rectangular rocks. A tremendous amount of crush was also required. Requiring about two full days of work, this crib was not an easy task, but ultimately it materialized thanks to the patience and hard work of several crew and club members.
The second major additional project was the mitigation of a spot where a seep was trickling water across the tread surface - leading to muddy conditions that promote rapid erosion. A large contingent of the crew tackled this project with enthusiasm - several members provided a constant stream of crushed rock and the rest of the group worked on moving and setting massive stones to build a step-over open culvert.
This was an ambitious structure to construct, requiring technical finesse in order to get the water to flow just right over a stone-lined bottom and safely off of the trail. Thanks to great, well-coordinated teamwork, the structure was completed in just one day! An impressive and sustainable solution to the drainage issue will help this relocation survive for decades to come.
While they weren’t busy building rock structures, the Crew 2 found plenty of time for fun in Georgia. For one thing, the “camping” accommodations for the week diverged considerably from the norm. Instead of a primitive spike camp on a Forest Service dirt road, this week the crew stayed at Camp Merrill, the US Army Ranger training base, where the mountaineering phase of Ranger training occurs.
Crew 2 enjoyed luxury accomodations at the camp’s gymnasium building - sleeping in a multi-purpose room on army cots, with access to showers and flushing toilets. The crew cooked dinner on the truck’s tailgate in the gymnasium parking lot - a different kind of wilderness experience! The lodging accommodations were quite comfortable, but did present some unusual phenomena such as the soothing sound of helicopters landing and taking off nearby at all hours, and the occasional wake-up call provided by ranger instructors doing their early morning exercises in the gym.
Crew 2 was also treated to a beautiful and secluded waterfall and swimming hole thanks to the guidance of Bruce of GATC. This was a fantastic way to cool off at the end of a hard work day. And a week in Georgia would not be complete without the end-of-week extravaganza at the abode of Tom Lamb, GATC’s trail supervisor. Besides a fantastic spread of food and beverages, the Tom Lamb experience featured tubing on the Etowah River thanks to the house’s strategic location right where the river forms an oxbow. Crew 2 stayed at the Lamb residence on this final evening of the crew week before heading back north in the morning. A final lunch stop at Scratch Pizza in Johnson City, TN provided the icing on the cake for this Konnarock adventure.
Many thanks to the small but mighty team of Konnarock volunteers who devoted their time and energy to working on Georgia’s A.T. section this week. As much as this week featured more luxury than usual, the work was still hard - made no easier by Georgia’s plentiful bugs, snakes, and poison ivy.
A huge thanks, of course, must also be given to GATC for their constant field support which provided a boost to the 5-member Konnarock crew - thank you all members of GATC who came out to help the crew. The hospitality of Tom Lamb in sharing his food and house was also abundantly evident to all members of the Crew and helped to make this week a fun and fantastic experience for all.
The adventures in Georgia, however, are far from over. Next week Crew 2 will be returning for another week at Camp Merrill, this time working at the nearby Gooch Gap Relocation. Will the work be completed as planned, or will the Konnarock Crew inadvertently get recruited for Ranger training? There’s only one way to find out - tune in next time on the Konnarock Blog to find out!
--Josh Reynolds, Assistant Crew Leader
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