Triumphant, Transcendent, Trailbuilding!: Week 5: June 11-15, 2014 Supercrew at Rocky Fork

Thursday, October 2, 2014

Week 5: June 11-15, 2014 Supercrew at Rocky Fork

Week 5: June 11-15, 2014

SUPERCREW at Rocky Fork!

Building sidehill trail from scratch

Without a doubt, the biggest cliffhanger of the 2014 Konnarock season was the Rocky Fork Relocation.

Week 5, Crew 1 and Crew 2 combined their forces to create an unstoppable SUPERCREW. The Supercrew headed down south to make some major progress at Rocky Fork.

What's so suspenseful about Rocky Fork? The Konnarock Crew made amazing progress this year! Did they finish this massive project? How far did they get? You'll just have to tune in to THIS BLOG to find out!

For the past four years, Rocky Fork has been one of Konnarock's most challenging projects due to the long hike in to the work site and the steep terrain--which requires a LOT of digging to build a solid tread.

Thanks to support from the Cherokee National Forest, which has transported the crew's equipment to the camp site each week, the crew camped a lot closer to the project this year--which meant more time working, less time getting worn out on the climb to the work site.

In addition, ATC was able to hire a contractor with a miniature trail dozer to do most of the earth-moving. Aside from a few stretches the dozer couldn't access, Konnarock volunteers were mostly finishing up the dozer work rather than digging trail from scratch this year.

The Week 5 Supercrew got to experience both: building new trail from scratch, and finishing up behind the dozer.

Former K-rock Crew Leader Deno Contos of Benchmark Trails runs the dozer

After a nice "warm up" on the long hike in, the Supercrew volunteers built/finished over 2,000 feet of trail! That included several log steps and some rock cribbing to support steeper places in the tread.

After five days of digging, the crew had a mighty appetite and was ready for a refreshing dip in the beautiful Rocky Fork Creek that gives this project its name.

Beautiful new trail, ready for white blaze.

Trail Maintainers from the Carolina Mountain Club brought a SUPERFEAST for the SUPERCREW! Thank you CMC, for feeding the Crew and celebrating their hard work!

And a SUPER THANK YOU to the SUPERCREW volunteers for their hard work on this important project!

For a little background on the monumental land aquisition that made the Rocky Fork relocation possible, check out this article.

And for more photos from Week 5, visit the album on ATC's flickr page.