Arnold, CA…Dear Arnold Rim Trail Cyclists, Equestrians, Hikers, and Runners, Here are the activities for May on the Arnold Rim Trail! Please mark your calendars now for May. Interpretive Nature Walks: • Wednesday, May 10th, Guided Sunset/Full Moon Hike to Cougar Rock, arrive by 6:15pm, departs promptly at 6:30pm See specific details below. • Saturday, May 13, 9am, Natural & Cultural History of the Area, hosted by Nancy Muleady-Mecham. • Saturday, May 20th, 1pm, Get to Know Your Conifers, hosted by Mary Anne Carlton. Please see details about both walks below. • Volunteer Trail Work Day: May 20th (as always, the third Saturday of each month from May to October.) Details below.

Saturday Interpretive Nature Walks. If you have never participated in one of Nancy or Mary Anne’s educational walks, you are in for a treat.

Saturdays, April 22, May 13, and June 24th, 9am
Stroll along the Arnold Rim Trail and explore “The Natural and Cultural History of the Area” with National Park Service Ranger, retired, Nancy Muleady-Mecham, PhD. Meet at the Sierra Nevada Logging Museum parking area in White Pines at 9am. The walk is two hours and two miles. Bring water. Hike proceeds rain or shine.

Saturdays April 29, May 20, and June 3rd, 1pm
“Get to Know your Conifers.” Join retired National Park Service Ranger Mary Anne Carlton for a walk along the ADA portion of the Arnold Rim Trail and learn about how to identify the trees of the Arnold area. Meet at the Sierra Nevada Logging Museum parking area in White Pines a 1pm. The walk is about 1.5 hours. Bring water. Hike rain or shine.

Volunteer Trail Building Mornings, third Saturday of each month from May through October: May 20, June 17, July 15, Aug 19, Sept 16, and Oct 21.

All trail buildling mornings follow this pattern: Please meet at the US Forest Service Station in Hathaway Pines at 8:30 am. After a brief safety orientation by Jeffery Hilson, our Stanislaus Forest Service Trail Manager, we will car pool to the section of trail we will work that day. Since it often gets warm as the morning progresses, please bring layers, gloves, hat, sunscreen, bug repellant, and water. Long pants are suggested as we encounter Poison Oak on occasion. If you have a favorite garden tool like loppers, bring those, but we will have tools for everyone. Folks from eight to eighty-eight are invited; children should have adult supervision. We wrap up by noon, sometimes a little earlier. If you have another obligation that day, feel free to depart sooner as needed.

Guided Sunset Hikes to Cougar Rock, scheduled near or on the date of full moon: May 10, June 9, July 8, Aug 5, Sept 5, Oct 5

Watch the sun set from the top of Cougar Rock on this moderate hike led by members of the Arnold Rim Trail Association. Distance is about 4 miles total, with 900 feet of elevation gain. If you haven’t done one of these hikes, you owe it to yourself to join the fun. They are scheduled to be near the day of the full moon each month, and they are special!

No sign-up needed, hike proceeds even if cloudy, but rain cancels. (And if the weather has been wet, please see caution below about road condition on dirt portion of Valley View Drive.) Bring layers, snack, water, bug repellant and flashlight as return hike is in the dark. If you sometimes use walking sticks, please bring them because about a quarter of a mile of the return downhill hike is rutted. We gather at the trailhead parking area one hour and forty five minutes before sunset, and depart one and a half hours before sunset. Return to vehicles about three hours after departing, give or take.

Please arrive at the parking lot at least fifteen minutes before departure time for introductions (this hike attracts wonderful folks) and a brief orientation by the hike leader, as departure times are prompt:
May 10th, Wednesday, arrive by 6:15pm, depart promptly at 6:30pm
June 9th, Friday, arrive by 6:40pm, hike departs promptly at 6:55pm
July 8th, Saturday, arrive by 6:40, hike departs promptly at 6:55pm
Aug 5, Saturday, arrive by 6:20pm, hike departs promptly at 6:35pm
Sept 5, Tuesday, arrive by 5:40pm, hike departs promptly at 5:55pm
Oct 5, Thursday, arrive by 4:50pm, hike departs promptly at 5:05pm
(Return to vehicles about three hours after departing.)

The parking area is at the intersection of Valley View Drive and 5N95Y. Drive 1.50 miles on Valley View Drive from the intersection of Lakemont Drive and Valley View Drive in Arnold. The first mile of Valley View Drive is paved, and the last 0.45 miles is dirt. Pay close attention to stay on the paved section of Valley View Drive and not get off on one of the side streets, because Valley View Drive curves around quite a bit during that first mile while it is paved. Please note there is no sign announcing that you have arrived at the parking area at the intersection of Valley View Drive with 5N95Y, but you will see the dirt road 5N95Y coming in from the right and also the parking area with picnic tables at that location.

Here’s a link to Google Maps that shows the drive from the intersection of Lakemont Drive and Valley View Drive in Arnold to the intersection of Valley View Drive and Forest Rte 5N95Y.
Here’s a link that shows you the location of the trailhead.
The GPS coordinates of the parking area:
North 38 degrees 13.171, West 120 degrees 22.707

(Caution: The half mile dirt portion of Valley View Drive can be very slippery and muddy when wet due to the clay nature of the soil. In fact, when slick and wet, it can be difficult for two wheel drive vehicles to climb back up the hill from the trailhead to the paved section of Valley View Drive after the hike, a hill that presents no difficulty whatsoever in dry weather.)

Questions? Email info@arnoldrimtrail.org. Pictures of the sunset hikes are often posted to the ARTA facebook page. Navigate to “Arnold Rim Trail Association” in your Facebook search field.

Please send questions, comments, or suggestions to info@arnoldrimtrail.org
Warm regards,
Arnold Rim Trail Association

Archive of Trail Tidbits from 2016:

October, 2016 Tidbits
• Kim Grissom is a professional cartographer who also volunteers with the Arnold Rim Trail Association. She is the person who is responsible for creating our wonderful Arnold Rim Trail Association map. In addition to the hard copy that is available for $1 at various venues in town including the Forest Service Office in Hathaway Pines, the Arnold Rim Trail Association has given permission to several smart phone mapping apps to allow the ART map to be downloaded and used from within their apps. If you download one of these apps and then download the ART map before going out on the trail, you will then have the map on your phone when you go out on the Arnold Rim Trail. You will no longer need a wi-fi or cell signal to use the map. The beauty of having the map on your phone is that you can geo-locate in real time no matter where you are on the trail, because your phone uses its satellite GPS function, and not cell or wi-fi, to provide this capability. The names of the two mapping apps are “GPS Maps by Avenza” and “Maplets”. For more information about these apps, please visit the Arnold Rim Trail Association webpage about this topic.

• The Sierra Nevada Logging Museum had another very successful Logging Jamboree over Labor Day Weekend this year. The Arnold Rim Trail Association had a booth at the Jamboree. Arnold Rim Trail Association Docents Rhoda Nussbaum and John Adams staffed the ARTA booth and reported that many nice folks visited them and talked about the Arnold Rim Trail. Thank you so much to our friends at the Sierra Nevada Logging Museum which is across the road from the Arnold Rim Trail trailhead in White Pines. The SNLM allows our trail users to park in their parking lot, and we are very appreciative to them for doing so. If you haven’t visited the museum itself, it contains a wealth of fascinating historical information about logging in our community. They are open from noon to 4pm, Thursday through Sunday, in the Spring, Summer, and early Fall months. They also have a website with more information about the museum and their activities.

Sept, 2016 Tidbits
• Laura Bowly of Laura Bowly Design built our original Arnold Rim Trail Association website about eight years ago when she lived and worked in the Arnold Area. It was wonderful and has served us well, still the website design technology at that time made it a bit difficult for us to update the site. Laura nows lives in Livermore, but just happened to visit our Arnold Rim Trail Association booth at the Family Day at Calaveras Big Trees State Park in August. We chatted with her, and she kindly offered to donate a modern WordPress based update of our website. Thanks to Laura’s generosity, our gorgeous new site in now up and running and we could not be happier. If you have suggestions about additional content we might include, now that it will be straightforward for us to add and change content, please send us an email.
• The Arnold Rim Trail Association has a special friendship with the Sierra Nevada Logging Museum in White Pines. Ginny Kafka and the entire leadership of that organization have been great supporters of the Arnold Rim Trail Association. They allow ART trail users to park in their parking lot (except of course for a couple of slots next to the Museum itself) and they sell our maps in the Museum. We are honored that they invited us to host an Arnold Rim Trail Association booth at their Logging Jamboree on Saturday, Sept 3rd, of Labor Day weekend. Thanks to ARTA docents Rhoda Nussbaum and John Adams for staffing the booth, they report they had a wonderful time doing so.

August, 2016 Tidbits:
• As we do every year, the Arnold Rim Trail Association will have a booth at Family Day at Calaveras Big Trees State Park on Saturday, August 20th, from 10am to 3:30pm. This is a wonderful event for kids and adults alike. Stop by and say hello, and ask your questions about the Arnold Rim Trail. (This is the same day we have a volunteer trail work morning. You can do both of course, volunteer on the Arnold Rim Trail in the morning and enjoy the Family Day in the afternoon.)
• We often receive emails and phone calls asking whether dogs are allowed on the Arnold Rim Trail. Dogs on the ART are under the same Calaveras County Statute as anywhere else in the County. Dogs are to be on a leash, or under the immediate voice command of the owner. We would emphasize that voice command means voice command! You know your dog, and if he or she is inclined to chase bicycles or horses in spite of your voice commands, we humbly ask that you leash your pup. We celebrate the fact that we have equestrians, cyclists, hikers, and runners sharing the trail harmoniously. Thanks for your understanding.

July, 2016 Tidbits:
• One suggestion that we receive from trail users is that we include additional signage that provides trail distances and more detail about the entire trail system, not just the Arnold Rim Trail but all the various side single and double track trails that crisscross the Arnold Rim Trail itself. The Association is currently compiling a list of proposed additional signage. We are pleased that the grant from REI is available to fund this project, it will allow our trail users to explore many more miles of the trail network. A hearty thanks to Nancy Summerlin, who is ARTA’s coordinator of the REI grant.
• The current Arnold Rim Trail includes a section of Forest Service Road 4N40 from near Cowell Creek to near Valley View Drive. Our goal has always been to replace Forest Service “double track” roads with “single track” trails, so that ultimately the entire Arnold Rim Trail would be single track. Over the past decade we have moved steadily towards that goal. “Single track” means a single path in the woods, “double track” means service roads and other wide bed paths. The 4N40 section is the only remaining part of the Arnold Rim Trail that uses a named Forest Service maintanence road. The Arnold Rim Trail Association is currently scouting and flagging four new proposed sections of trail. Two of these proposed new sections would be single track trails, one on either side of 4N40, that would bypass the 4N40 service road altogether. (The other two sections are side trails off the Arnold Rim Trail proper. More about them in future tidbits.) ARTA will provide Forest Service with .gpx files of the possible new trail, along with flagging of these proposed routes, so that FS may conduct field analysis to ensure the trails comply with Forest Service standards and can be built in a sustainable way for future generations of equestrians, cyclists, hikers, and runners to enjoy.

• Finally, we wish to let all our trailusers know that ARTA has a wonderful ongoing collaborative relationship with our land managers at the Hathaway Pines District Office of Forest Service. Without their expert leadership and passion for this project over the past ten years, there would be no Arnold Rim Trail. Thank you, Calaveras Forest Servicev District, we love working with you!