Cherokee Hiking Club
198 Crews Drive, Benton, TN 37307

Trail Maintenance
Crowder  Branch Trail

Monday, November 10, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
May 16, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Crowder Branch Trail (FS Trail 84) is a trail within the Cherokee National Forest in the Tellico Ranger District which connects Doublecamp Creek Road up Crowder Branch to the Fodderstack Trail (part of the Benton MacKaye Trail) at the old Crowder Homeplace and their apple orchard. You may not find the apple trees anymore since the usual forest succession is in process. The old fields used to be maintained as wildlife clearings until the area was designated as part of the Citico Creek Wilderness in 1984. The combined Citico Creek and Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wildernesses which are contiguous are the second largest wilderness area in the Appalachians, second only to the nearby Big Frog/Cohutta Wilderness area. At the Crowder Homesite is a nice campsite with water available nearby from the headsprings of Crowder Branch.  The trail is about 2.6 miles long and is fairly steep in the middle section. The total elevation gain is about 1440 feet. The Crowders sold their land to the Forest Service in 1935. They were the only year-round settlers in the Fodderstack area. You may see evidence of bear and boar, which are plentiful in the Citico Creek Wilderness, which also happens to be a Bear Reserve. Be careful and wear orange in the fall during bear hunting season. The Benton MacKaye Trail is almost 300 miles long, extending from Springer Mountain, GA, to the north end of the Smokies and passes right by the old Crowder Homesite. The route of the Benton MacKaye Trail is one of those considered for the Appalachian Trail and the route favored by Benton MacKaye himself, the father of the Appalachian Trail.

Monday, November 10, 2008: Rick Harris, Tazz Reid, Bobby Mitchell, Ed Ley, and Robert Thomas worked on logging and brushing out the Crowder Branch Trail. We made it about half way up the trail or a little ways past the half way point. In that distance, we cut about 20 trees off the trail with a crosscut saw. We brushed out the trail with a swingblade and two loppers and well as hand saws. It will take another trip to complete the work all the way to the top. At a later date, we may need to go in and repair some of the sidehilling for safety purposes. Otherwise the trail is in fairly good shape. A map of what we have done so far can be accessed by clicking here. Our volunteer hours are as follows:

	Driving Time	Working Time	Total Hours
Rick Harris	1.0	5.0	6.0
Tazz Reid	3.0	5.0	8.0
Bobby Mitchell	2.0	5.0	7.0
Ed Ley	3.0	5.0	8.0
TOTAL HOURS			29

Monday, November 17, 2008: Robert Thomas worked with us yesterday as we continued clearing the Crowder Branch Trail. We started work about half way up the trail at the point where the work trip last week stopped. We logged out about 12 trees with the crosscut saw and 6 more with the axe for the day. This completed logging out the trail to the Fodderstack intersection. We also cleared some of the worst spots where the Rhododendron was encroaching into the trail corridor, and cleaned up a lot of small stuff in the trail. There is still a lot of brush out work remaining on the upper end to bring this trail back to maintenance standards. 

I would estimate that about ¾ mile of the trail needs tread repair, since it has filled in to become very narrow. This made for some poor footing in the fall leaves and wet roots, causing all of us to “bite the dirt” a number of times. Hopefully we can use the AHS Volunteer Vacation Crew next May to improve the treadway. 

Here is our volunteer time for the day: 

Name	Travel Hours	Work Hours	Totals
Ken Jones	2	6.5	8.5
Tazz Reid	2	6.5	8.5
Ed Ley	3.5	6.5	10
Totals	7.5	19.5	27

Monday, May 16, 2011 - Jeffrey Hell Trail - Three of us tackled several blow-downs both in and out of Wilderness. We removed three trees from the Jeffrey Hell Trail, removed a problem tree from the South Fork Citico Trail and sawed out a huge mess at the bottom of the Crowder Branch Trail (about 7 trunks). The hours are;

Bill Hodge - 5 hours worked - 1 hour travel
Tazz Reid - 5 hours worked - 1 hour travel
Tom Smith - 5 hours worked - 1 hour travel

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - Crowder Branch Trail - I [Ken Jones] went in on Crowder Branch Trail after lunch to check on the SAWS crew and do a little work on the trail. I started up from Doublecamp Creek and hiked in about 1.5 miles to where I intersected the 5 person SAWS crew. They had completed brushing out and logging out the upper 1 mile of the trail. They had just reached the point where tread work was to begin, but did not have their digging tools with them (it was 3 p.m. when we met up). I did maybe 30' of tread repair and then started back down the trail. There were 3 places where trees were blocking the trail and needed short relocations. Two of these spots were where the trees were located such that clearing the trail with a saw was too dangerous. I used my Rouge Hoe to scratch in a route so that they could dig these or our volunteer crew could on Thursday. There is a lot of digging, saw work, and brush out work remaining in the lower 1.5 miles of this trail. Here are my hours for the trip:

Ken Jones Travel Hours =3 Work Hours = 3.5 Total = 6.5

Thursday, June 16, 2011 - Crowder Branch Trail - The volunteer crew worked up Crowder Branch today to meet up with the SAWS crew that was working down from Fodderstack Trail. They had brushed out and logged out about 1 1/4 mile down the trail. They had also done tread repair on about 1/4 mile of the trail. In the lower 1 1/4 mile of trail, there were 2 blowdowns with root balls hanging over the trail. These blowdowns were impossible to safely clear with the crosscut saws. The volunteers dug a short reroute to get around the lower of these 2 blowdowns. We then continued uphill and met the SAWS crew at the second big blowdown. We jointly worked on the digging in the second reroute with switchbacks. After we completed this work, we went back downhill logging out blowdowns as we hiked back out. We did not have time to log out all of the remaining trees, leaving maybe a handful of trees in the lower 3 stream crossings. Several of our crew also worked on brushing out some of the lower 1 1/4 miles of trail. The SAWS crew had gotten wet while camping in the storms on Wednesday night, so they decided to come out at the end of the day today. Here are the volunteer hours for the work day

Name	Travel Hours	Work Hours	Totals
Ken Jones	1.5	7	8.5
Tazz Reid	1	7	8
Roger Taylor	1	7	8
Bobby Mitchell	1.5	7	8.5
Joanne Mitchell	1.5	6	7.5
Totals	6.5	34	40.5

Thursday, July 21, 2011 - Mill Branch Trail - Crowder Branch Trail - Thanks to good reporting from Stephen Eren, our Citico Wilderness Ranger, we were able to focus our efforts on clearing problem blow downs from 3 of our wilderness trails yesterday. One crew went up Mill Branch Trail about 1/2 mile to the site of a multiple tree blow down completely blocking the trail. This blow down had 5 trees across the trail and took almost 3 hours for us to clear. The other crosscut saw crew went up Crowder Branch Trail and cleared 9 trees along the lower mile of trail. The SAWS crew had recently cleared the rest of the trail of blow downs. After the two crews ate lunch, we met up and traveled to Falls Branch Trail. There was a large buckeye tree down across the trail at the falls and about 50' before the end of the trail. We removed 2 tree forks and chopped footsteps in the two remaining large forks that were buried in the ground. The Crowder Branch Trail and Falls Branch Trails are now clear of any blow downs, and Mill Branch has about a half dozen remaining trees across the trail, spread out over the upper 2 miles. Here are the volunteer hours for this work trip

Name	Travel Hours	Work Hours	Totals
Ken Jones	1.5	7.5	9
Jim Holland	2	7.5	9.5
Julia Chromiak	2	7.5	9.5
Tazz Reid	1	7.5	8.5
Roger Taylor	1	7.5	8.5
Kyle Atkins	1.5	7.5	9
Totals	9	45	54

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