We kept at the trails until we’d hiked everything along the east side of the road between Rockwood and Purgatory Trail in three different trips last week.  Most of those days were bushwhacking and discovering old abandoned trails no longer in use. Finding old power lines high above the railroad tracks in the canyon below the trails, is a good example.

Another example of old technology in the canyon is an old seemingly abandoned power plant, but still keeps running on.  The Tacoma Power Plant is only accessible by railroad and not a normal stop on that line, so the only way to access this remote location is by hiking down into the Animas Valley canyon.

We’d seen the power plant on a number of hikes down Sawmill Canyon, but never thought to ask about a tour, until we’d seen a presentation at an annual meeting of our local electrical coop, which was even more dry than my typing about it.  The featured speaker was a fellow from that power plant and his talk was just about as dry, but we were determined to learn now than he gave out at the annual meeting.

We got a personal tour and it was well worth an extended look. The history, the improvements, past and future, is something to behold. For a little hydro plant this has quite a bit going for it. He was far more animated in his home territory than speaking in front of 300 people.

We got the full story of an event eleven years ago, when one of the generators got a vibration alarm on Halloween night, and the remote operator in the Denver area choose to silence the alarm.  2,400 signals later the generator blew up sending shrapnel thought the roof and took the several ton generator off it’s base destroying just about everything.

In order to repair it they needed a whole litany of thing before they could replace it.  For example, the bridge to deliver improvements from the train needed replacing, and then the cribbing for a embankment needed replacing, then the transformers as well.  Eleven years later they are just now ready to start on replacing the generator.

It’s an amazing part of our local history hidden down a canyon, now only accessible by a pop-car or a specially commissioned flat car delivery equipment to the power plant. This power plant only delivers about 5 MegaWatts of power to the local grid, but is enough to keep it on line and have two employees commute via that pop-car up the train tracks.

Really interesting is the fact that the lead engineer for this project came from the American Ski Area tram industry. He’s only been at Tacoma for 12 years and his last job was building a ski lift for Silverton Mountain for Aaron Brill.  He’s very quickly found a niche that suits him well, as he’s got an old abandoned tram out back of the power plant that used to take employees and kids up and down the mountain. He’s got permission to restore the tram wheel house in his spare time.

Small world, this mountain country.

One of the problems with spring hiking in our area is when does the snow melt?  Generally it’s on the southern exposures first, so we pick trails that are south facing and tend to be below the snow line.

One thing I forget each year is that just because it’s on the south side and below the snow line, it doesn’t mean that it’s smooth hiking.

Winter conditions have persisted in Durango and Colorado in general above 10,000 feet so we’re limited mostly to out and back trails. We hiked, however, on Monday, a loop trail leading up to Missionary Ridge and three miles across, to come down another trail back to the car.

In 11.3 miles we photographed (documented for a trail crew with waypoints on GaiaGPS) 61 trees blocking the trail.  Hikers never have a problem with downed trees, but the US Forest Service likes to keep these trails open for horseback riders.

In the five years I’ve been a WIS volunteer, we’ve never seen so many downed trees.  It’s primarily a factor of the 2001 forest fire which killed most of the trees in several sections of the trail, but the new growth is now coming up splendidly, as you can see in the background.  We also do a little erosion control, but without an ultralight shovel we can’t do much.

My favorite photo of the day was finding the trail marker for the return trip laying on it’s side at the top of the ridge.

In trying to figure which trails are open already this year, we find that we are recording trail conditions rather than giving advice on the Wilderness.

And for Public Lands Day I volunteered on the Sky Steps Project placing 500+ steps from City of Durango to Fort Lewis College, a 250-foot rise from the valley floor to the college rim. It’s a Trails 2000 project that will take several months to complete.

There has been a hillside trail for almost 25 years in this area, but this is the first time someone has endeavored to put in a bona fide stairway.  It goes fairly slowly as they are using 6×6″ rough cut beams for the construction, with rebar anchors and 12″ screws between the timbers.  Volunteers are doing all the work, which amounts to surveying the route, clearing the trail, cutting the steps, filling the voids with rocks before adding road-base filler, and then grooming the edges.  Our efforts were able to fill in about 60′ of rocks and road-base, plus add 3 small sections of stairway totaling about 30′. Believe it or not, this took almost 30 people, carrying timbers to the site, foraging for stone filler, “fire lining” buckets of gravel to fill the stairs, and grooming the hillside.  They have still another 200′ of stairway to build and all the filler to make it usable. (Photos courtesy of Trails 2000 – I forgot my phone)