The Quarry Road Trail, An Impressive Effort

Dawn broke on Saturday November 5th with the most beautiful blood red sky behind a still dark Mount Sutro. I regarded this as a good omen for a very challanging day of stewardship that had been in the making for several months. The Sutro Stewards hosted the Bay Area Ridge Trail (BART)/REI service day for the first time. We set the bar (rock bar if you will) very high and capped registration for the event at 100, making this our largest event ever. We reached that goal with a few days to spare and immediately began to receive emails from volunteers who still wanted to participate.

Staff worked hard to register everyone and move them from the Woods Lot Registration site to our Staging Site at the new Quarry Road Trailhead in a timely manner. Bern Smith from BART kicked off the safety talk and ten minutes later we divided crews up and assigned crew leaders and tools. Options for the day included choosing to work in Poison Oak… or not, heavy duty drywall construction… think big rocks, major blackberry and ivy removal, trail construction and benching, and the planting of four Redwood trees on a very steep and slippery slope.

My initial thoughts were that we'd never complete this ambitious work in one weekend, let alone just the 3 hours we had left before it was time to break for lunch. Imagine my astonishment as I walked the length of the new Quarry Road Trail alerting the crews that we had 30 minutes to wrap up before lunch and we had a nearly complete trail running from the South Ridge/Historic Trail intersection to the bottom of the NIKE Road. AND… it wasn't looking like a quick and dirty job either, this trail already had some wonderful features and a great flow as you traveled along it.

A Huge Thank You to the 100+ volunteers who contributed to the success of the Quarry Road Trail project!  Photos are now posted under the visuals tab and even more impressive is that Google has already added this trail (unnamed) to their online map (http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en&q=google+m...) just click the zoom button over mount sutro and you'll see the new trail just below Nike Road.