Five Cent Gulch Project
The RCD is well known for the road restoration and decommissioning work that it does in the South Fork Trinity River Watershed. Additionally, this summer a similar project was completed in the Weaverville Basin. The Five Cent Gulch Project, about 1 mile north of the Weaverville Airport, was funded by the Trinity County Resource Advisory Committee, which has made erosion control projects a high priority. Concrete Aggregate Products, one of our local contractors, was hired to upgrade and winterize the first 600 feet of the road with rock. A parking area was constructed at the end of the road for future use as a staging area for fire fighting equipment to help defend the East Weaver Creek residential area from fires, and the remaining 1.25 miles of this severely eroded road was removed. This project is part of the Forest Service’s goal to improve the watershed conditions within the Weaverville Basin by reducing erosion sources. Roads that are no longer maintained by the Forest Service receive a low priority due to budget constraints and often develop erosion problems that can lead to sediment delivery to local streams. In the case of the Five Cent Gulch project, the road did not receive any maintenance over the last several years and traffic from off-road vehicles during the rainy season created tire ruts that continued to get worse until they became gullies. The gullies connected to Five Cent Gulch directly or to an irrigation ditch that eventually empties into Five Cent Gulch just above the Weaverville Landfill putting unwanted soils in the Weaver Creek system.
The project included the removal of a culvert at one creek crossing that no longer functioned, because it was exposed from erosion, replacing an undersized culvert at another creek crossing on the East Weaver Campground Trail with one large enough to carry the stream’s flows and the removal of an undersized culvert from the irrigation ditch.
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