Staking Trail

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This past Saturday we spent about 8 hours staking trail. This was mostly a portage trail on land with some of the trail crossing frozen lakes.




The land portions of the trail are marked with pole tripods that have reflective tape stapled to them. We had to follow along the trail standing up tripods that may have fallen down (if we could find them) replacing tripods if needed, and replacing reflectors if needed.




Uyaana was pretty much just along for the ride.




Every now and then the trail will cross a tundra lake like this one.




To stake the lakes we cut willows from nearby.




We need to get willows of basically the same diameter.




Then using a cordless drill with a 1.5" diameter blade you drill a hole into the ice.




Put the willow into the hole.




Put the reflective tape onto the willow.




On one of the lakes we saw some bear tracks.




The section of trail that we were staking was a total of 19 miles long.




We were only able to get about 12 miles of trail done on this day. It took us 8 hours to do that much.




Here is a screen shot from Google Earth that shows the approximate location of the section of trail we staked Saturday on the Baldwin Peninsula.




According to the Northwest Arctic Borough there are over 1,000 miles of maintained trails in the borough. This is just one of them. There are several other trails that we need to stake and we are just waiting for the ice conditions to be right before we start.

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