From July 8-15, 2006, I took part in another Volunteer Vacation, this time in the Cascades of Washington State.  I worked on the Iron Goat Trail, which was a rails-to-trails conversion of a section of rail line used by the Great Northern Railroad from 1893 to 1929 to cross the Cascades into Seattle.  The line was abandoned when a new 7.8 mile tunnel was opened.  The construction of the Iron Goat Trail officially began in 1990 when Volunteers for Outdoor Washington, the National Forest Service, and others entered into an agreement to build the trail.  The trail has been completed to the abandoned town site of Wellington, and more work is still going on.

Our focus in 2006 was on starting a trail from the future trailhead, working up the mountainside, and constructing a steep connector to the upper grade of the trail, towards the Windy Point Tunnel.  The connector will ultimately have about 13 switchbacks, totaling approximately a mile up the side of the mountain.  We were able to finish about a quarter-mile during our week of work -- which might not seem like a lot, but believe me, it took a ton of work.  While some of us were only there for a week, some great local volunteers work on the trail throughout the year.

Isn't this scenery amazing?  This is the view from the road down to the valley.  The Cascades can be breathtaking in their scope.

We stayed at Stevens Lodge, a nice ski lodge that had fine kitchen facilities, cots in large rooms, and small (but refreshing) showers.  Imagine how scenic this rustic place looks in the winter.

When you wake up in the morning and slowly get ready for the day's work, you often saw fog.  Perfect for a Hitchcock film.

We rode down to the work site in the back of Jim's pickup, and the fog actually worked to our advantage, because you couldn't see over the edge of the winding road.  What a great way to wake up in the morning.

In the very early stages, this is what the trail on the side of the mountain looked like.  The Forest Service staked out where the trail should go (you can see a blue stake in the foreground), and we followed their lines, even when there were trees, stumps or the inevitable boulders and rocks in the way.  While the Forest Service had felled some of the trees in the way, we had to clean up and clear the way after them; dropping trees was only stage one.

In the next phase,  you had to dig into the side of the incline to get the trail to be about four feet wide.  There had been boulders and rocks there before.  This small section is hardly done... removal of rocks and brush, leveling, and more tasks follow.  Stan and I often had the task of moving boulders in the way.

And here is one of our friendly boulders.  Often there is no way around a boulder; you decide you have to move it.  And moving a massive rock can take a long time; we spent 90 minutes on one boulder, using the pulaski and crowbar and gradually piling smaller rocks under it for leverage.

At lunch time, sit back and enjoy the view.  Remember where you are.  Sometimes you get so focused on the work on the trail, that you have to remind yourself of the spectacular scenery around you.  Yes, things are as green as they seem.

We weren't allowed to use chainsaws; we had to leave that to the Forest Service.  Although sometimes we could divert the path around an obstacle, at other times it was just impractical.  We had the service of a NFS worker with a chainsaw one day, and his cutting of this downed tree saved us a little work.

We had one day off from work, and most people did some hiking on their day off.  A group of us followed a trail near the lodge, and the morning mist made it seductive.

Grace Lake, our destination on that hike, was largely hidden by the fog, even in the late morning.

Ruth, who has been a driving force behind work on the Iron Goat Trail for many years, still joined us every day, even though she is in her 80's.   We would be working on a section of the trail up the mountain, and suddenly we would see her with her hiking poles, making her way up the mountain and checking on the sections we had done.  There was a ceremony on the last day to mark the opening of a trailhead, which will soon look even better with a kiosk and signs.  Ruth is an inspiration and a reminder of what one person can achieve with persistence.

Um, yeah, that's snow.  Even in July, you will find snow by the Lodge.

Stan's mantra was, "I think we can move this rock, Tom."  Stan has been an avid climber and hiker all his life, and he has the strength of ten guys.  And he hated, hated, giving up when a boulder blocked our trail.  He would want to move a rock, I would say "I'm not sure about this one, Stan," and we would try it anyway.  And about 95% of the time, we would move the darn thing.  As a few of us stayed in the vanguard to blaze the trail and do heavy lifting, a great crew followed behind us to do the important and tiring brush work and leveling work that made the trail hikeable.

Here we are: the amazing and hard-working crew of the Iron Goat Trail.