Blaze Day!

 I've explained a lot about the how and why of this before, so I won't cover that again. Here are the tools.

I'll just say that I'm pretty sure the last time this section of trail was blazed was in 2010. That's way too long ago. Not good, but sometimes these things happen. Too few volunteers, whatever... The link at the end is the year that Ellen and I did part of this section. Yes, that's a 14-year-old blaze.

I went out with Dan D. today, and our goal was to touch up a half mile of trail in each direction. That is usually plenty for one day. Dan wanted to try a template he made for spraying the blazes. I have to say that this is not standard, but he wanted to try it.

He was really careful to not let the paint flare out inside the edges of the template. I'll concede that. Here is the sprayed blaze.

I'll stick with using a brush. A lot of the trees we had to use in this section are large red oak. They have deep ridged bark that is really difficult to get nice blazes on, but here is one of my reasonably good successes.

We had help from Riley, the trail-blazing dog. She thought the blue paint was great for accents.

We also did a tiny bit of white blazing on a side trail, but we were getting tired, and the white paint was too thin.

I got to do a little bit of back-roading on the way home. I was just on this road not too long ago, but can't find the date. It's a back way from Freesoil Road that actually has a bridge over the Big Sable River. It's fine as long as the weather has been fairly dry. Yonkers Rd.

My goal after I got home was to get 100 more miles of campsites done, and I did it. Had to really knuckle down!

Total miles hiked in 2024: 200.6 of which 70.6 is North Country Trail.

North Country Trail, Mason Co. Michigan, Tynadall Rd to Koenig Rd. and back. 1 mile

See More Blue Blazes