“In my opinion, Ellis has gone from a trail to avoid, to a trail to enjoy.”
…Bob Lowder, October 7, 2024
October 15, 2024 – Canyon Young writes: Another big thanks to everyone involved in what became one of the most major trail projects on the Sandia Ranger District this year.
As many of you are likely aware, the Ellis Trail historically followed an old road bed in the clearcut for what was originally going to become a spur road going north off the Crest Hwy decades ago. And thus, the trail had a lot of unnecessary, unsustainable, and rather unpleasant ups and downs.
Several years ago, Kerry Wood and the SRD Trails Crew, in conjunction with NM Volunteers for the Outdoors (and possibly FOSM, I don’t recall), completed a handful of reroutes that successfully bypassed some of these unnecessary steep sections. I and my old crew were a part of the construction of this first phase, back when I was the seasonal trails crew lead. However, I distinctly recall while hiking back and forth between the trailhead and those initial reroutes and realizing that more would likely be more necessary at some point in the future.
Fast forward to this year, I found “Ellis reroutes” on the Cibola National Forest’s Recreation Program of Work, and found out that the entire trail had a 30-meter archaeological clearance corridor as cleared through the 2018 Sandia Hazard Tree NEPA Project. With this knowledge, combined with knowing that other priority trails projects would be in limbo while awaiting approval from other resource areas, I saw a prime opportunity to keep my crew’s and FOSM’s Thursday trail construction crew’s momentum uninterrupted, all the while accomplishing meaningful work and continuing to whittle down Cibola Recreation’s currently-gigantic POW.
It can be difficult in many scenarios to successfully design sustainable, quality reroutes with the standard 30-m corridor that we as USFS trails staff often have to deal with, given the steepness of our local mountain terrain combined with sustainable trail design parameters. However, I knew that in this case, with the sections I would want to bypass and how Ellis was laid out, I essentially had a blank slate to get the entire remainder of Ellis where I wanted it, so long as I put in some careful effort with my design and flagging. Two of the nine total reroutes did have to dip a bit outside the 30-meter corridor in order to make sense and be sustainable; however, Sandia’s archaeology staff was able to quickly and painlessly write an addendum for these since there were no known cultural resources in the area.
In addition to my ever-present objective for all SRD trails of making the entire length of Ellis more sustainable for our mountain ecosystem and more enjoyable for all trail users, the big-picture outcome I had with this project was to make Ellis more mountain bike-able, and thereby aid in better dispersing mountain bike traffic around the district as a whole. By replacing the old, steep, eroded sections with quality reroutes that ride well both ways, this effort will combine with the reroutes done on 10K North over the past several years to create a quality loop opportunity on an area of the district that was largely avoided by many cyclists in the past. And, this will hopefully result in a bit less hiker/mountain bike conflict on Challenge and other nearby. Even if as little as 5% of the bike traffic on the district is diluted through this effort, that’s a victory in the grand scheme of building SRD’s trail system into a network that can handle the ABQ area’s ever-increasing, multi-use recreational demand with minimized future management input from both the USFS and volunteer groups.
Again, thank you to everyone involved for being a part of this major project, and thereby part of SRD’s big-picture mission!
October 4, 2024 – Thursday crew leader Laura Leon provided this exciting report:
We did it! Ellis reroutes are finished! Twelve weeks of working on Ellis has been a treat. We’ve watched as the flowers bloomed, then the grasses and now, with the weather cooling, the aspens blazing. The most amazing crew ever gave it their all on Thursday and the 10 volunteers and the 3 SRD crew (Dorothy, Zay and Chris) pushed through a long day and a long hike out with tools. The last 2 reroutes, #8 and #9 were finished and the obliteration completed. We even managed a cranky hiker who “just doesn’t understand” why we were out there messing with the trail. Thanks to everyone who has participated over the last 12 weeks- you helped make this job a success!
Laura’s 12 reports summarizing the project can be found here. In them you’ll find not only details about the project but also some wonderful photographs of Sandia wildlife.