RRC Archives

A heartfelt thank you goes out to the 180+ persons who attended the Eighth Annual Muir Valley Trail Day Saturday. Weeks of preparation and pre-planning by Mark Ryan, his supervisors - Jeff Colombo and Roger VanDamme, and several top gun crew chiefs paid off in spades in making this one of the most productive trail days in the country. Started at 9 sharp and finished around 5 PM. As always, Carol Yates and her food team did a super job in the kitchen. There was an efficient team at registration that quickly processed volunteers quickly. A wealth of door prizes. Major trail projects included a new 50-foot benched trail section and new 26-foot stair case on the Bone Yard trail, rebuilt Sunbeam Buttress trail, new Seneca-class rock stairs on the Sunnyside trail, new bridges at Sunnyside, Midnight Surf, and Calvin Hollow creek crossings, completely revamped and hardened belay bases for Johnny's Wall and Tectonics Wall, rebuilt creek crossing at Tantroft, tons of chainsawing work on the ground and up in the trees, poison ivy and invasive species control, landscaping and ditches built everywhere, completely new trails built to Sunnyside and Sunbeam Buttress, new emergency stations installed augmenting the new SAR cache building on the Valley Floor, and the list goes on. Bottom line - a lot of good folks worked their butts off to continue the effort to craft Muir Valley into the premier climbing area in the Eastern U.S. Built by climbers for climbers.

Rick and Liz

I was a small part of a large assembly line that moved up several tons of large rock, dirt, sand, and gravel via 5 gallon buckets. Any idea just how much weight we transported from the bottom of the trail to the base of the cliff? It's kind of cool to think that each person on that line moved approximately "x tons" from the pile of stuff about 30 or so feet further up the trail, kind of like little worker ants.

Hard to guess the tonnage. Literally hundreds of buckets at about 50 pounds per bucket. And this was only the Tectonics/Johnny's wall brigade. The same thing happened at the Boneyard trail, and the new Sunnyside trail. Many tons, I'm guessin'.

For a second I thought we were building a pyramid at the top of the trail...

As one of my students stated, "I now believe the pyramids were built by aliens."

That was a lot of rock.