My Job

Trail Maintenance Extraordinaire

- Trail Maintenance -

My job as the trail crew supervisor for the Bend Fort Rock Ranger District takes me to some of Central Oregons most beautiful outdoor scenery. I get out and enjoy the outdoors almost daily. From clearing a trail of fallen trees, reconstructing a trail, building bridges or patroling the wilderness boundary on snowmobile it's all in a days work for me.

I may not get paid all that well but the working environment and the personal satisfaction are hard to come by in any other job. Getting to work for other departments and working on forest fires are other ways of keeping things interesting.

The slides in this series show some of the projects and day to day events that are part of my job.

Trail Clearing
Here trail crew member Justin Japs and I are clearing logs off the trail. On this particular day we had 2 saws running and cleared over 400 logs off the trail. Not a typical day though.
Click on the photo for a larger view

Bridge repair.
Here we are repairing a bridge on the Peter Skene Ogden Trail. The decking and rails were rotting and it needed some support in the middle.

Winter trails.
We also have 350 miles of winter trails. Here I am on a snowmobile patrol at Sheridan Mountain Shelter.

A couple years ago we had so much snow that this shelter was completely buried and you could not find it.

Campout at Wickiup Plains.
To clear some of our trails sometimes we have to camp out so we are close to the job. Here we are at Wickiup Plains near South Sister.

North Trail Fork Bridge.
Flattening the logs so they fit together perfectly.

North Fork Trail Bridge.

The final product after 3 weeks of hard work. We made this without the help of chainsaws and there are no metal fasteners holding the rails in place.

Puncheon on the North Fork Trail.

This is a close up of a puncheon we made on the North Fork trail with native materials.

Snowmobile Patrol.

Wilderness boundary signage. We get a lot of snow up in the higher country and it is a constant battle to keep the signs above the snow. So after every big dump we have to go raise them out of the snow again.