VWA Willow Creek Restoration Project
Project Update
July 11, 2004

On July 10, 2004 a crew of 15 VWA members hiked into the McGranahan cabin site to remove the dilapidated suspension bridge spanning the Willow Creek gorge and to finish bagging all of the remaining trash at the McGranahan dump site. The bagging activity, as nasty as it is, proceeded without a hitch because we now had so much experience bagging trash from previous outings both at this location and at the Hobbit claim upstream. The removal of the suspension bridge, an entirely new activity, had been studied and analyzed for months and proved to be one of the most exciting highlights of the project.

Constructed in the early 1970s to provide access to the long gone McGranahan cabin, the bridge consisted of four wire rope cables, two 5/8 inch cables as main supports and two 1/2 inch cables as hand rails, with a wood walkway and hand rail system attached to the cables. The total span was about 150 feet with anchorage to a bedrock outcropping on the cabin end and to an old redwood stump on the opposite end. It was determined early on that to remove the bridge safely, it would need to be dropped into the gorge and disassembled there. The project biologists required that that activity not be done until after July first to avoid possible impact on aquatic life in the stream. In the final analysis it was decided that we would first try to drop the bridge by removing the cable clamps and if that did not work, we would use an impact cable cutter. As it turned out we resorted to the impact cable cutter and with a few well placed whacks with an eight pound sledge hammer, the bridge was down. The next several hours were spent carefully removing the wood decking and railing attachments from the cables, further cutting the cables to manageable lengths and then gathering up all the old nails and other pieces of hardware from the creek bed and gravel bar. All of this material was then packed out of the gorge, the lumber to a future burn site and the hardware to a stock pile to be packed out at a later time.

While the bridge was being readied for demolition, another group of volunteers worked on pre- assembling backpack loads of the cut up machinery and building materials that had been stockpiled at the cabin site on earlier project outings. Bundles of loose similar materials were typically duct taped together to make them easier to strap onto our export backpack frames.

Because we had such a large turnout of hard working volunteers, the bridge demolition, the remaining trash bagging and the packaging of backpack loads was all completed by the end of the day on Saturday. Not to be denied more wilderness stewardship joy that weekend, a small group of volunteers camped Saturday night and on Sunday morning moved approximately 125 trash bags stockpiled at the Hobbit claim across Willow Creek to a more accessible stockpile location for the final export weekend.

Everything is now ready for the big export weekend scheduled for July 30 through August 1 which we have dubbed "The Big Haul".

Assembling pack loads
Don, Adrian and Tom unclamp cables
Impact cutter all set
Suspension bridge before the fall
Suspension bridge up close
Bridge coming down
Adrian and Tom disassembling
	Don, Mike and Adrian cut cable in the creek
	Mike, Adrian and Ed cutting cable
Hobbit bags relocated