Re-Benching A Popular Summit Trail

On Saturday, August 26, Trails Coalition staff and volunteers headed up to the top of Trail Creek Road to work on the popular Kane Summit #53 trail located in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. This was our first volunteer project in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, having just signed the volunteer agreement this year.

And what a great first project it was! One of the most obvious issues with this trail was that it was starting to roll outward, gaining too much outslope, and becoming off camber enough to be noticeable to hikers, bikers, and equestrians.

We managed to re-bench about 0.3 miles of the trail through some of the steepest hillside. “Re-Benching” is essentially the process of cutting the tread of the trail into the hillside. The tread is dug down on the backside of the trail (closest to the hillside), and then compacted to flatten the tread. This labor intensive process takes a lot of earth moving, and isn’t for the faint of heart!

By the end of the day, the section we worked on provided a much more stable surface for trail traffic.

We headed back to the trailhead where, under a lightly refreshing drizzle, we enjoyed a delicious lunch courtesy of the Sawtooth Backcountry Horsemen - what a great partnership!

In fact, the Sawtooth Backcountry Horsemen went for a ride after they fixed us lunch, and afterward sent us a note exclaiming that their jaws literally dropped at the amount of work they saw. “My mouth was wide open!”