Moss Branch

Last weekend we had our monthly work party. Debbie was out of town, so I was the crew leader. First time! I'd probably give myself a C+/B-. We got the work done. Nobody got hurt or lost. But there were some things that I forgot during the safety briefing (thanks for backing me up Nancy) and even later during the day.

We did get a bunch of good work done though. I'd ridden Moss Branch the previous week, and it had become a jungle.

We cleared lines of sight.

Cleared the corridor of all these bendy trees that bikes could get under, but you wouldn't be able to on a horse.

And then we hit the proper jungle. I joked that everything we'd done up to that point was just training for this.

I think we spent as much time on that section as on all sections before and after combined.

But it looked great when it was done.

The reason it was like that was that several years back there had been an ice storm that brought down a dozen trees right through there. That opened up the canopy and let good sunlight in, all th way to the ground. Time passes... Brush grows up.

We made it all the way to the creek (our intended target) and then cleaned up a bit on the way back.

We had a really good crew too.

That's me/Nancy in the middle. Jesse to the far right. He'll be volunteering at the Fool's Gold this year. The tall guy is Josh. He's been working with us for years, and he's now coaching the mountain bike team at Truett McConnell College. The rest of the crew is part of said mountain bike team, getting in their community service hours. I dig this whole "we need community service hours for such-and-such" thing. We've had a lot of volunteers over the past few work parties for that very reason.

I still need to turn in the work hours. I've been swamped this week, getting everything straight for the TNGA and haven't had time to even think about it.