My buddy Walt was approached to take point on a return to Tank Hollow Road in George Washington and Jefferson National Forest outside Natural Bridge Station in Virginia. This was a project site I had visited back in late 2022 with a very hardworking team of volunteers. On that project we not only picked up trash along the road, cleaned up dispersed campsites, and put up signs, but we also fished a half-dozen appliances up from a cliffside where they had been unceremoniously dumped. While we managed to get what we could get, the steepness of the terrain necessitated a bit more gear than we had at the time.
Tread Lightly impact report for the 2022 Tank Hollow Road project
Given the proximity of Tank Hollow to the Bald Mountain Jeep Trail, Walt made the decision to just stack the two events back-to-back. This would allow some overlap in volunteers and resources between the two projects. However, given the technical nature of getting the appliances up off the cliffside he opted to keep the group small and thus did not put out a public call for volunteers. This kept the group size manageable and, on a project like this, less is more when it comes to people. With Walt taking the lead, the rest of the project team consisted of myself, John from New Horizons Overland, and another buddy of ours Jonathan who had helped on previous projects on Bald Mountain.
This has been “home” for the last few VA4WDA cleanups on Bald Mountain Jeep Trail
In the background is an amazing CCC pavilion with an epic fire place, that alone is worth it
The plan seemed simple enough. Two people would repel down the hillside and rig the appliances. The other two of us would be on top of the hill working the winch as well as a 2-to-1 pulley rig to get the appliances off the winch line. I say the plan was simple enough, but as we all know no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Once we were there and rigged up we realized just how much things had changed since the last Tank Hollow project in 2022.
This sort of marker serves to let people know we are working in the area
and that this area is being monitored
Gravity is a fight no one wins. Over the years with all the weather cycles and storms the appliances that were once near the top of the hill had fallen, slid, rolled, and/or even jumped down near the bottom of the hill. This put them far outside the reach of those on the repelling gear and far outside the reach of our winch lines — even with extensions. Coupled with some logistical hitches due to said extensions and the complexity of the rigging meant that in almost four hours of work on site we only managed one refrigerator.
While this project was small in scope, and was a small team, it was not without its degrees of collaboration, cooperation, and compromise. As a team we collectively briefed and debriefed the project to come up with a new, and hopefully better, plan. We agreed on what worked which were things like a small group, having the over-the-hill team on their own personal repelling lines, and using an endless loop to make a sling style basket. We also agreed on things that did not work such as using a winch and how we rigged the manual 2-to-1 pulley system. A compromise we all agreed on was skipping the winch next time and just using a super long static line through a redirect pulley to the bumper of a rig and using that to pull stuff up. Lucky for us this was a plan we got to test on a small scale during the Bald Mountain project the next day — more on that in the next article.
We choke up on the tree to give a little more lift to the winch line and also help moving the load to the road a little easier — spoiler alert, it was anything but “easy”
It would be easy to feel discouraged about spending a solid day on site and only recovery one appliance. However it was a major learning experience. Something I always tell my students is, “an experience is only a failure if you didn’t learn anything.” One of the learning theories I ascribed to early in my education career was David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle. This cycle was comprised of four phases: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. A mistake a lot of people make with this particular theory is thinking it is a planar cycle. Rather it is more like a spiral staircase or a screw. With each lap around the four phases things progress forward.
This process, rooted in experience but fueled by reflective observation, was something we put into practice albeit in an informal way. After struggling to get one solitary refrigerator up the hill we took a moment to reflect on what went well and what did not. From there we threw about a half dozen alternatives out there. This was the abstract conceptualization part. After that we decided on a new plan that we would, luckily, get a chance to test out the following day. We’ve now reached the active experimentation part. That experiment would then lead to new experiences we could reflect upon. Some people liken this process to a marble circling the drain. With each revolution it gets closer and closer to its goal. Same for us. No process is wholly perfect. Nor are we as individuals perfect either. When I jokingly say, “I’m a lowercase ‘e’ eXPERT” this is why. There is always room for improvement. The people around you can always offer a different perspective.
One key thing to remember, and something I think our team gets right more than it doesn’t, is that different isn’t always better or worse. In these kinds of situations when you have a lot of experienced people in the same room working on the same task <cough> collaboration <cough> cooperation <cough> there can’t be ego involved. This is why compromise is a great ideal to hold yourself to. Compromise doesn’t mean admitting you’re wrong, your idea is bad, or someone is more superior to you. It just means their experience and knowledge led them to a different conclusion. I’ve often found you can combine the best bits of different ides and often come up with a new better idea that no one on their own could have come up with.
Couldn’t ask for a better group to work with on projects like this
At any rate, after our catch-of-the-day was loaded into the USFS truck we packed up the last bits of gear before the rain came back and we set our sights back north to Sherando Lake Campground for another night around the fire.
Sadly it was closed, but we still opted for a photoshoot while were in the area
Checkout the Bald Mountain Jeep Trail article for the continuation of this story.
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