6 folks willing to brave the Twin Lakes road at 7 in the morning, and the haul of materials up Winchester Mountain, made a day of it on Saturday, and what a day it was!
The weather was as spectacular as it gets, the huckleberries were turning colors, the smoke held off and the views were everything that Winchester had to offer, which is considerable, but we had work to do.
The old door was removed in chip chop time and the assembly, dry fitting, cutting, dry fitting, cutting some more, dry fitting some more … and several more times 😉 resulted in a well fit, solid, latchable door to the lookout. Primed and painted I might add.
An inventory crew went through every inch of the lookout documenting its contents, and weeding out quite a bit of old paint cans, stain cans, other cans and more cans. They then decided that said weeded out stuff needed to come down the mountain so we made a pile, and it was huge! Whew, we hauled stuff up, but down too, hmmm, as the day wore on it became obvious that maybe there was another solution.
There were folks staying in the lookout, folks staying on the flat ground on top of the mountain, folks walking through the lookout, around the lookout, asking for the restrooms and …well, you get the idea. More of them on the trail coming up and, happily, they all needed to go down (except those staying of course). We quickly decided to use the old adage, “It can’t hurt to ask”, so we did 😉 The number of people that agreed to pick up an item from the pile and deliver it to one of the three white pickups that could be seen from the lookout was amazing, really! Everyone was happy to help in some way and they did. The pile of unused, unwanted, unrepairable and just unneeded stuff moved from the top of the mountain to the bottom of the mountain. It made the people carrying the stuff down happy, and it made the people that would have had to carry the stuff down happy, win, win, and all were happy.
That was really the theme of the day, all were happy, and the lookout now has a door that will protect its inner door through this winter.
Oh, the drive down was a bit nuts at 3 in the afternoon on what might be the last nice Saturday of the summer but hey, it was well worth it for a day on Winchester Mtn.
Next year the list will be longer and the projects will be larger. We will reach out to the club members for help several times through the summer, so if you have not been to the Lookout, it is a treat, and hauling stuff up does not necessarily mean that you have to haul it down 😉
Photos on the MBC Flickr Page.
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Jim Gizzi