OUTDOORS & REC
B2 — THE OBSERVER & BAKER CITY HERALD
CLAYCOMB
Continued from Page B1
numerous awards
• AR — Who doesn’t
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• Henry’s lever actions.
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• Air guns are super pop-
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• Boots — I love the
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• Caldwell Stable Table
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Stocking stuff ers
Here’s where you can
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• Flies
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fi rst aid gear. This is the gear
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• JSB pellets for their air
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• Aquimira fi ltered water
bottles
• Mountain House back-
TRAIL
Continued from Page B1
She gave some statistics on
the online popularity of the trails
group.
“With Instagram and Facebook,
we’ve grown our membership by
about 50% in the past year,” she
said. “We have 1,200 Instagram
followers and almost 800 Face-
book followers. We’ve been able
to open up conversations through
that. So we’re reaching younger
folks who are working full time
who want to do day trips and proj-
ects and we’re incorporating that
into our next season of planning.”
Bombaci spoke highly of Hum-
phrey’s ability — as a younger
person — to connect via social
media.
“Asch has done a great job of
getting the word out there because
I sure am not a Facebook or Insta-
gram person, I don’t know about
you guys,” he laughed. “She’s been
very successful at that.”
Showing their work
Bombaci gave a slide show to
the commissioners showing photo-
graphs of their work, maps of the
trails systems and charts detailing
the work.
“We primarily work in the
Eagle Cap and Hells Canyon wil-
derness areas,” he said. “We have
done some work outside the wil-
packing meals (These are
almost gourmet!)
• Ammo — very specifi c
what caliber, manufacturer
and grain he or she shoots.
Testing some Nosler ammo
right now
• Mister Twister plastics
and jigs
• Pautzke Fireballs
• Swab-Its cleaning gun
cleaning swabs
• Clamtainers, plastic
ammo containers. Great for
fl ying
• Talon Snap pistol
cleaning kit
• Freedom Baby ABC, an
outdoors ABC book for kids
learning their alphabet
• IOU that you’ll go
fi shing/hunting with him or
her. This will be the best gift
you could give.
derness, but most of our work’s
been inside the wilderness bound-
aries. We’ve done a little bit of
work in the Wenaha-Tucannon
Wilderness in the north part of
the county and that has been in
coordination with the Umatilla
National Forest. We’ve done a
little bit of work on the trail at the
Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland and
a couple other places that have
nothing to do with the Forest Ser-
vice, but it’s mostly the Forest Ser-
vice land that we’re working on.”
Emphasizing the scope of the
group’s work, he noted that most
of their eff orts are in offi cial wil-
derness areas and come with
restrictions.
“I think there’s about 1,200
miles of trails,” he said. “Because
most of our work is in the wil-
derness, almost all of our work is
with hand tools. We use loppers,
crosscut saws, Pulaskis. There’s a
lot of teamwork involved.”
He then showed a photo of men
lifting a log off a trail.
“These guys were just using
brute strength,” he said.
“We do, occasionally, do work
outside the wilderness boundary
where motorized equipment is
allowed,” he said.
Commissioner John Hillock
sought further details on this.
“Would a battery-powered
chain saw be legal?” Hillock
asked.
But Bombaci said even an elec-
tric-powered tool is banned from
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2021
Tom Claycomb/Contributed Photo
Outdoor enthusiasts can be easy to shop for — if you know what sort of gear they want.
federal wilderness areas.
Nash talked about the diffi culty
working just with hand tools can
bring.
“I’ve cut my share of trees and
I can only imagine how discour-
aging it would be to get in there
with a crosscut saw and see it
wedge into place and not be able to
move it,” he said. “I’ve had to cut
those four or fi ve times with chain
saws in order to get the fi rst piece
to move.”
The main job the trails
group does is clearing trails for
recreationists.
“No. 1 is we clear trails using
crosscut saws,” Bombaci said.
“Much of the trail clearing is just
about cutting out logs, but also
there’s a huge brush problem,
especially in areas that have
burned, as you can imagine, the
timber’s burned up and there’s a lot
more sunlight hitting the ground
so we have these terrible brush
problems. It’s very labor inten-
sive to do brush with hand tools.
I’m not quite sure what the long-
term game plan is for that. We had
a group of people … and in four
solid days of work they covered
less than 2 miles. The brushing is
going to be a challenge.”
Heritage sites
Another part of the group’s mis-
sion is to work on heritage sites,
such as cultural resources, historic
structures and Nez Perce crossing
of the Snake River.
“Our biggest project to date has
been the Lick Creek Guard Sta-
tion. It has a lot of rot. It still has
a lot of rot,” Bombaci said of the
building that was erected in 1930
and is now listed on the National
Register of Historic Places. “It
was in danger of falling apart. We
managed to clean up the grounds
around the building, moved some
outbuildings that were causing
snow to build up against it and
exacerbate the moisture problem,
we repainted the whole thing, we
cut a hole in and I was down there
in the dirt to dig out the crawl-
space to make it bigger and put a
vapor barrier and pulled out some
rotten timbers and replaced them.”
But the project is still not done.
“We were unable to fi nish the
job and I think if the Forest Ser-
vice really wants to save that
building, they’re going to need to
come up with probably a few hun-
dred thousand dollars to get some
professionals in there to do the rest
of the work,” he said. “But we did
save a lot of the building so that
it’s not going to continue to deteri-
orate at least.”
This year, the group also
replaced a footbridge on BC
Creek, Bombaci said, showing
slides of the work there.
“This was a thorn in our side
for several years, Todd can tes-
tify to that,” Bombaci said. “That
Forest Service bridge blew out in
2002. Almost 20 years had gone
by without the Forest Service
replacing it and we nagged them
and tried to get them to move a
suspension bridge up there, but
that didn’t pan out. As a result of
our eff orts, they did get in gear and
now we have this great footbridge
there. That tree (used as the basis
of the bridge) was growing right
there. They didn’t have to move
it; they just had to winch it into
place. … That’s vastly improved
the usability of that trail. It’s a very
popular trail. … That was a great
win for us this year.”
The trails group also goes high-
tech when possible. Bombaci said
that since money from Travel
Oregon granted for the BC Creek
bridge wasn’t used on the sus-
pension bridge, the group asked
if it could use those funds to buy
a computer-controlled router to
make signs. They’re now manufac-
turing signs that their volunteers
and the Forest Service both are
putting up. Bombaci said they will
continue making signs this winter
so they’ll have some to erect in the
spring.
“It’s a very visible sign that
something’s happening out there
and we’re getting a lot of positive
public feedback,” he said.
Bombaci emphasized that the
trails group is in no way political.
“The organization was formed
with the explicit intent that we’re
not a political lobbying group,” he
said. “We’re just a bunch of folks
who want to get out there and do
some good.”
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