My latest iteration of the Burnabop route series is a single ~57km loop that uses a couple sections of particularly low-traffic trail, and one short section has been quite brutal – its maybe 150m long but features several creek crossings, steep and muddy slopes, and can be so overgrown it virtually disappears. So I’d purchased some hedge trimmer shears for the purpose of adopting this section of trail.
But first, I needed to fuel up, so I stopped at Dageraad for a burger. I rarely eat beef; in fact, quite literally the only beef I eat is this smash burger when I visit Dageraad during a ride.
The trail was just a couple km away after this, and I arrived to find it even more overgrown than I’d feared:
I also underestimated how much work it is to shear! As I write this a couple days later, my forearms are still sore. I hadn’t sweat that much in a good while – including riding. Below are a couple spots before trimming; it didn’t look a whole lot different afterwards because I failed to bring a rake to clean up after myself – but at least stuff isn’t growing into the path for now, and I can go back for a second pass sometime.
Below are a couple sections of trail on the route that are past the rough section I’d been working on – these sections need nothing, they’re perfect as they are! And I was very pleased to see that someone had come through with a chainsaw and cleared the fallen trees since I’d been through last. The heroes of the forest!
I popped out of the woods to a pretty dramatic sky which I wasn’t expecting.
I was then on an old road that leads a short ways to Robert Burnaby park, where there are a couple huge black cottonwood trees I wanted to measure up now that I had the hardware to do it.
There are also some decent size hemlocks in here too (below left) that might be older than the town they’re within.
I measured two cottonwoods, with the one pictured below being the largest at 1.83m diameter. I submitted it to the BC big tree registry and it’s been verified for the list!
And headed home… treated to a dramatic sky as the light started to fade.
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