A Summer of Work on the North Fork West Pass Trail

Most of the time, when you see WRTC crews out working on trails, we’re on the Ketchum Ranger District of the Sawtooth National Forest. That’s our home turf, and maintaining that local trail network is at the heart of what we do.

But every once in a while, we like to help out on neighboring districts, like the Salmon Challis or the SNRA.

This summer, we’ve been proud to lend a hand on the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA), where we’ve spent the season working on a section of the North Fork West Pass Trail.

What started as a single project has turned into something of an ongoing WRTC effort. We kicked off the trail reroute and rebuild during our partnership Women In the Wild Weekend with Idaho Trails Association. Since then, we’ve brought another volunteer group out to continue the work, and this latest workday with our WRTC Board was the third time we’ve gathered a crew on this section of trail.

It has taken a lot of hands to get it where it is today!

The original trail included a particularly steep and challenging section, so the project has focused on building a sustainable re-route above it. The new alignment traverses an extremely steep sidehill, requiring plenty of digging, widening, shaping and moving dirt to turn the rough route into a durable, enjoyable trail.

Over the course of the summer, dozens of hours of staff and volunteer time have gone into this stretch of trail. Each group has built on the work of the one before it, slowly transforming the new alignment into a finished trail.

This time, our lovely WRTC Board joined the Hybrid Trail Crew for the day. With everyone working together, we were able to widen and shape a fairly long section of the new trail. After plenty of digging and a whole lot of dirt moving, we ended up with a beautifully buffed-out stretch of trail.

The weather cooperated, too, which certainly helped keep spirits high. In fact, with our board and crew working together, we had almost as much trouble keeping the chatter and laughter down as we did moving all that dirt.

We’re proud of the work WRTC does close to home, but we’re also grateful for opportunities to contribute to the broader trail network that connects our communities and public lands. Working outside the Ketchum Ranger District isn’t our everyday role, but when there’s a good project and an opportunity to put our trail-building skills to work, sometimes we get to cross a district boundary and help out a neighbor.

And this summer, that has meant returning to the same stretch of trail again and again, bringing different groups of volunteers into the work, and watching a rough mountainside slowly become a finished trail.

That’s the kind of trail work we love: showing up, putting in the hours, and leaving a trail better than we found it.