Bear Mountain Construction – Nov. 30, 2012 – The Halfway Point
Friday we reached a key milestone for this fall’s dig – the halfway point of the planned 4.2 miles of new trail, along the northern face of Big Bear Mountain. The portion of the seventh section is a rolling, winding trail that snakes along just below the northern summit of Big Bear Mountain as it goes around large rock outcropping, boulders and old growth hardwoods. The completed product, as you look back on your finish work, has a beautiful, natural patina of fresh earth and fallen leaves. The new trail looks like it belongs there and is an enhancement to a serene stretch of remote woodland overlooking the sparkling waters of Lake Ouachita. The new Traildog Vista that peeks through a wide break in the forest canopy is a must stopping point for any user and will be one where a million Kodak Moments will be shot.
At the end of the day Friday we had completed grooming 2.14 miles of newly dug tread. The machine crew is almost a mile ahead of our finish crew and are hoping the weather will hold through the coming week, allowing them to complete the machine construction by end of the week.
We are suspending our finish work until the machine crew reaches Brady Mountain Road, as it taking us almost three hours of travel time to and from our work site. Our current tentative plan is to resume finish work on the final two lies of new tread on Monday, December 10th. We will no longer enter from the West end of construction utilizing the USACE barge, but will instead come in from Brady Mountain Road on the East end of the seventh section. We reassess where the dig is at late next week as we set our schedule for completing this fall’s dig.
We owe a special thanks to the US Army Corps of Engineers for their generously loaning us their work barge to transport our volunteers and equipment to and from the base of Big Bear Mountain. Without this barge we would not have been able to complete this first half of this dig. We also owe the good folks at Crystal Springs Resort for furnishing us a slip at their marina to store the barge for four weeks.
The National Recreational Grant for the final section seems to be moving along through the approval process at the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department, with approval notices to to be sent out in the first quarter of 2013.
Thanks,
Jerry