Client: Pisgah Area SORBA
Location: Brevard, NC
Pisgah Area SORBA is an extremely active trail advocacy organization overseeing the Pisgah Ranger District and surrounding areas. Through their efforts, they have been awarded several Recreational Trail Program (RTP) grants for rehabilitation, reroute, and new construction of multi-use trails in the Pisgah National Forest. Nature Trails was selected as the contractor to perform rehabilitation on the a group of trails radiating from a central intersection with Club Gap. Our scope of work required us to create positive drainage and sustainable tread surface on legacy, fall line logging trails often in excess of 20% grades that were never designed for this application. Our work was restricted to using the existing trail prism which meant that we had to develop creative solutions for drainage without realigning the trail to reduce grades. In addition, we had to work closely with the US Forest Service to prevent conflict with numerous Native American archeological sites that exist along the trails.
As part of the rehabilitation process, we identified use patterns of current trail users and worked to develop creative ways to maintain and improve those characteristics in a sustainable manner. Some of these solutions included solutions such as relocating large boulders to armor optional jumps lines and excavating a huge rock slab to incorporate it as part of the tread surface.