The Future for Mount Wilson

So what are the reasons for designing a new trail on Mount Wilson, which will start from Navajo Lake and lead all the way to the class 3 approach? This trail is part of the Rock of Ages trail, which has a lot of history of old mines. Much of the current trail alignment is part of these old mining cart roads that have held up for at least a few hundreds of years. However, some of the trail dips down into a few riparian areas, which is unnecessary and tough for hikers to walk through. The current trail corridor becomes wet and mucky, and hikers usually try to avoid the mud by hiking off trail. Also, when climbing a fourteener most folks do not enjoy losing elevation multiple times on the ascent.

The rerouted trail would allow for better drainage and help reduce the amount of erosion occurring in the fragile alpine tundra. Another reason McEllhiney and I thought to move this trail was due to the presence of large snow fields which hang around late in the Spring. Last season, we surveyed the snow and recorded that about 75% of the basin sat in snow. A large portion of the current trail was disguised by this lingering snow. Therefore, the average hiker was unable to see the trail, despite a few constructed cairns along the route.

Loretta and I have scheduled two 10-day trips to finish the design process. We hope that CFI can start construction on the new route (funding dependent) at the start of the 2019 field season. We just finished our first 10-day trip and progress has been good. A total of 1.1 miles is projected to be built in the Basin. We currently have over half of our construction notes for the multi-year project. We are halfway up the hillside to the technical section of Mount Wilson, but that is where the design starts to get challenging. Since we can’t build a new  route on this section due to the Spring snowfields, we will be forced to reconstruct the current user-created route. The lack of suitable building materials in this section will make this a complicated and challenging section to build. Some sections will require a cable tram system similar to the one currently being used on the Mount Columbia trail reconstruction project. If a tram system cannot be set up, we may not be able to harden the trail surface all the way to the start of the class 3 scramble. The next 10-day trip we hope to accomplish the small re-route around the lake (0.3 miles). This starts around the willows near the lake and upper camping areas, then joins the existing trail which will be used for about one mile before our new trail reroute begins.