The San Gabriel Mountain Trail Builders build hiking trails and perform repairs and maintenance on trails in an effort to limit the human environmental impact in the San Gabriel Mountain chain.

In areas where humans hike, bicycle, picnic, and camp, the lack of established, professionally developed trails results in a number of unplanned trails that are almost always dangerous since they take a direct route from parking areas to rivers. Numerous unplanned trails caused more extensive erosion to microenvironments and cause some spreading out of litter that gets dumped along the trails.

Planned trails seek to make the grade up and down hills approximately 12 percent so that they're not dangerous, and the trails are often made fairly wide so that our furry Forest Service Freddies (USFS) can get horses into an area to collect and haul out garbage. (Making trash hauling easier for USFS Freddies or volunteers that otherwise have to pack out tons of trash means trash collection can take place more frequently and in less time.)


At areas in the woods where humans like to collect, the U. S. Forest Service will often install trash bins and toilets, seeking to reduce the environmental, impact. And humans being what they are, vandalism and other stupidity inflicted upon the infrastructure designed to limit or control human environment damage is fairly common with toilets being smashed up, burned down, and what not, and with trash dumpsters getting picked up and thrown over cliffs to roll down into canyons.

Fortunately, the San Gabriel Mountain Trail Builders have a crack team of professional, highly trained, multiply certified Dumpster Rescue Team (DRT) members which remains on 24 hour alert, ready to chopper to any location within the mountain range to recover and restore heavy trash dumpsters.

When it was reported that a dumpster along Highway 39 near Mile Marker 28 was over the side, the DRT swung into action and some 12 hours later some how managed to avoid dragging their own pickup truck down into the canyon during the dumpster rescue.

The day previously, by the way, I photographed about 40 people down in a canyon along the San Gabriel River at Mile Marker 26.91 with a camp fire. Nothing makes me angrier, nothing gets my urge to scream obscenities going more than people who start fires in MY forest.

I spend a lot of time in the mountains on my bicycle and often there's fires at night that I can't report since there's no Freddies or police officers anywhere handy, but this one I was able to locate when the Freddies down below were present and had a heavily armed Sheriff with them. I got a poor photograph of the people and the fire which I've added.


* My old bicycle and backpack before it was shredded by a bear
* People setting illegal fires down in the canyon bottom
* For this project I spent the night under this oak tree
* The dumpster was lifted off of this ring and rolled into the canyon below
* Ben attaches some heavy chain to the dumpster
* A griphoist is used to slowly bring the heavy dumpster up the canyon wall
* A lot of effort later, the dumpster is back on the highway
* Looking at the project from above
* The Dumpster Rescue Team packs up and gets ready to leave

Site map is at: Crystal Lake site map


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