TUESDAY, AUGUST 2, 2011
VOL. 20 NO. 79
Three fires under investigation BY MELISSA GRIMA THE BERLIN DAILY SUN
BERLIN — Berlin Fire Department was kept on its toes last week with three fires in the area of Willard Street between Thursday and Friday. All three incidents are under investigation and possibly related. On Thursday, fire crews responded to a brush fire in the area behind the Harvest Christian Church. On Friday afternoon, a similar fire was extinguished in the woods behind the high school. According to Lt. William Maddalena of Berlin Fire Department, both were started when someone lit the bark on birch trees.
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A witness said she saw a juvenile male light the birch tree that started the brush fire behind the school, Maddalena said. Police were able to get a description of the teen, but were not immediately able to locate him. Friday evening, fire crews responded to Willard Street yet again, this time for a shed at 117 Willard that was in flames. Maddalena said it is unclear whether that fire is related to the two woodland fires, but “the brush fires — they’re definitely related.” Anyone with information on any of these three fires is asked to call Berlin Fire at 752-3135 or Berlin Police at 752-3131. Mike Saucier, “Pie,” helps guide a large boulder while Nico Azel, trail name “Weezy,” uses a come-along to pull the boulder up the steep Tuckerman Ravine trail where the AMC trail crew are rebuilding the stairway last Thursday. (JAMIE GEMMITI PHOTO)
Trail blazing: Four-man crew rebuilds section of Tuckerman Ravine Trail BY ERIK EISELE THE CONWAY DAILY SUN
A group of younsters take a turn at the needle felting station in the family pavilion manned by Marcy Schepker of Harrisville (not pictured). The hands-on activity was one of many available for children and families who attended the centennial celebration of the Weeks Act at the base of the Mount Washington Auto Road on Friday, July 29. (MELISSA GRIMA PHOTO)
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wild. “We’ll clean this up and make it even more bombproof,” Salisbury said, this time pointing at a section that had been cut back into the hillside, away from a 50-foot drop. “Instantly it’s better and safer and more stable.” The work is anything but easy, however. The four-man trail crew tackling this section spends nights at Hermit Lake and hikes into the bowl each morning. The crew members bring pry bars, Hilti hammer drills, grip hoist winches (“a real key to trail work for us,” according to Salisbury) and pick-axes up on the mountain to help them transform exposed slopes into pleasant paths, but much of the work is done with their hands. “Usually we don’t use all this equipment,” Salisbury said. “This is a special occasion.” On the Tuckerman headwall, he said, if boulders start tumbling there won’t be anything to stop them from strafing sections of trail below. “The potential is there,” he said, so they closed the trail from Hermit Lake shelters to the top of the headwall. “It’s so nice to work on a closed trail,” he said. Usually hikers go around the crew, but in the ravine there’s no space. “The potential here is much higher for disaster.” see TRAIL page 5
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MOUNT WASHINGTON — Most hikers don’t ever think about it, but trails through the mountains don’t build themselves. They have to be chopped, chipped, cut and carved out of the landscape, and from the moment they get cleared nature fights to crawl back in and overrun them. Sometimes nature wins. But sometimes the hikers fight back. “Look at these rocks, completely buried and grown over,” said David Salisbury, the White Mountain trails supervisor for the Appalachian Mountain Club, pointing at stone steps marching up the Tuckerman Ravine headwall a trail crew dug out from under a patch alders. “It’s funny, we’re sort of discovering old relics here.” But they’re not only discovering old relics, they’re building new ones. The Tuckerman Ravine trail is one of the most popular trails in the White Mountains. It leads 4.2 miles from the parking lot at Pinkham Notch to the summit of Mount Washington, passing pine forests, stunted krumholtz, alpine tundra and talus of the summit cone, traversing the famed Tuckerman Ravine headwall along the way. It climbs 4,250 feet from notch to summit and varies from a single-lane forest road to an exposed goat path. This year, for the first time in decades, the most precarious section is getting rebuilt and rehabbed, reclaimed from the
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