East Tiger Mountain; Log Wall

After digging out duff we are left with a huge hole spanning several feet on the trail.  Because we are limited to the materials around us and also what we can carry it can be very difficult to fill this gap.  One remedy is a log wall.  A fresh "green tree," or living tree is felled, skinned, measured, cut, then carried over to span the gap.  In this particular case we are fortunate to have two trees to lock both ends of the log into.  The two trees alongside the trail have the roots carefully picked at to find a nice place for the log to fit in between.  By setting up the log this way, when pressure is applied, the tree roots prevent the log wall from blowing out onto the hillside below.  The lack of large rocks forced us to use another green log as fill.  Typically we would use large rocks placed strategically along the bottom to not allow any movement, gradually adding rocks smaller in size on top before covering with mineral soil.  Over time after a rain fall the mineral soil does filter down and fill in the gaps between the rocks to provide more stability over time.  A green log as a substitute works also because when a log is properly skinned (debarked) the process of decomposition takes a longer time; especially when it's cover the log is exposed to the least amount of elements.

Why don't we use all dirt? We can but finding access to a lot of dirt, especially good trail dirt (mineral soil), is difficult.  There is a hole in the ground because we had to remove the bad dirt (organic matter/soil) and replace it with material that does not readily decompose or retain moisture.  Rocks take up space and are sturdy so that is our go to when it comes to fill.  Remember we can only bring to the site what we can carry since this portion of the trail is all hand built with human power (except when the tree is cut we use a chainsaw.)