I mean, what else would you want to do on a 90+ degree mid-June day in the Southeast? It's not like poison ivy is carpeting the entire forest floor with its eyes fixated on your blank canvas of an epidermis. It's not like there are more ticks than fish in the ocean all blood thirsty from a winter of hibernation. Its not like one hour of work will completely saturate every article of clothing I am wearing like I just jumped in the Tennessee River. Nah…It's not like we are Sherpa-ing in heavy tools miles into the forest to cut a trail into the side of the mountain on top of that. Oh wait...that’s what we are doing - all. summer. long. YES!
But you know what, I wouldn’t trade these days for anything. There were 17 of us at the first day of the Trail Dayz of Summer. We made some of the first cuts into the earth which will ultimately lead to a quite a holy grail of boulder fields the SCC just acquired – Hells Kitchen. These days will continue every Saturday, every weekend – all Summer. I knew a handful of folks already there, but I didn’t know the other handful and what better way to get to know someone than to put on a pair of work gloves, sweat your ass off and create something that is going to be used and walked on for generations to come?
After about 4 hours of cutting about 100 meters of trail, we all moseyed down and laid in the unbelievably refreshing waters of Roaring Creek – the namesake creek for the trailhead and parking - and rinsed off all those poison ivy oils we had been accumulating all day. Following the 30 minutes of cooling, we all meandered back to the parking lot where everyone got schwagged out for attending. On the Road and Off in conjunction with Ground Up Sales donated plenty of Teva, Fayettechill, Metolius, Petzl, and Rab gear to send everyone home with some nice booty. If that doesn’t sound like enough, we all then drove 4 miles up the road to Monkey Town Brewing for a well deserved lunch and craft brews.
This sequence of events will be occurring the second Saturday in both July and August. So…to be clear…the trail days are occurring every single Saturday this Summer thru the SCC. The second Saturday of every month’s trail day is sponsored by ORO and Ground up providing plenty of freebies to thank all those attending. Next time, we will provide cold refreshments during the balmy raffle segment.
Thanks again to all who showed up! The more people that come to these throughout the Summer, the quicker this trail is completed! Lets be the region where we spend as much time giving back to the climbing community as we do climbing and using the resources already given to us. Lets join together and create climbs, create trails, create steps, create relationships, and most importantly create a community that is stronger than we were the day before.
It was such an awesome moment to walk down the trail cut by all 17 of us at the end of the day knowing it didn’t exist 4 hours earlier. Meeting 12 new faces and sharing the experience with them was an added bonus. Before today, 12 people I now know were strangers and 100 meters of trail didn't exist.
See yall out there!
