Shelters added to Ouachita Trail

OUACHITA NATIONAL FOREST - Emergency shelters are becoming increasingly available to outdoor enthusiasts traveling along the western half of the Ouachita Trail.

Members of Friends of the Ouachita Trail, a nonprofit volunteer organization with approximately 200 members, began building new shelters in 2013, adding to nine similar shelters along the eastern end of the 223-mile trail that were built in the 1990s.

Based on the Adirondack shelters that are located approximately every 10 miles along the Appalachian Trail, the three-sided shelters are meant to provide cover from severe weather conditions, as well as a place to rest along the trail, organization president Bo Lea said.

“We just wanted to take the Ouachita Trail to the next level,” Lea said. “It just adds another amenity for people who use the trail and makes it a little easier for people with kids. As a backpacker, it’s nice just to be able to sit down.”

Construction of the trail, which begins at Talimena State Park in Oklahoma and ends at Pinnacle Mountain State Park near Little Rock, began in the early 1970s. In the early 1990s, U.S. Forest Service personnel began working with the Youth Conservation Corps and several volunteer organizations to build a series of shelters along the trail’s eastern end.

The Ouachita Trail is accessible year-round, although certain sections maybe closed because of controlled burns or other events. The terrain is considered extremely rugged, and opportunities to access water can be few and far between, especially in years during which drought conditions persist.

The trail has dozens of access points from numbered highways and Forest Service roads. There is no mandatory registration to use the trail, so the numbers of annual visitors is difficultto estimate.

Tom Ledbetter, a U.S. Forest Service recreation technician and trails coordinator for the Ouachita National Forest, assisted in the construction of the first four shelters in the Jessieville Ranger District, beginning with the Big Bear Shelter in 1991 or 1992, approximately 73 miles west of Pinnacle Mountain.

On Thursday, about a dozen members of the organization were working through intermittent rainfall to piece together the trail’s 15th shelter, located just shy of mile marker 101, a few miles north of Pencil Bluff. When the rains became too strong for too long, Lea would order the crew’s small gas-powered generator to be shut off and everyone to cease work and crowd under a large tarp until the downpour passed.

Despite the brisk winds and cool temperatures, organization member Matt Williams said he preferred to endure the early spring Arkansas weather rather than the heat of high summer.

“This is still better thanthe Pashubbe Shelter,” Williams said, referring to the trail shelter the organization built near the western end of the Upper Kiamichi River Wilderness area in Oklahoma in June. “I’d rather work in the rain and cold than do another one of those in the heat.”

Construction of each of the shelters has presented its own challenges. Although the U.S. Forest Service typically assists the group by delivering materials as near as possible to the construction areas, many of the shelter sites aren’t accessible by vehicle, even by Forest Service roads.

When the organization built the shelter near the Holson Valley Vista, about 17 mileswest of Talimena State Park, in November with help from Americorps volunteers, workers had to hand-carry every piece of equipment and material down a 120-foot bluff and across the trail.

After the ninth original shelter was constructed by the U.S. Forest Service, no new shelters were constructed for more than a decade. According to the Friends of the Ouachita Trail’s website, planning for the series of 12 new shelters began in 2009.

Lea said the group’s initial six shelters were paid for through a recreational grant from Oklahoma. Estimating the cost of each shelter at about $8,800, organization members initially raised more than $13,000 in donations to purchase materials up front, then began relying on reimbursements from the grant administrator to proceed from one shelter project to the next.

Lea said that to fund the remaining six planned shelters, the organization plans to apply for a grant from the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department.

Carlos Meredith, an engineer with the department’s programs and contracts division, said that the department’s recreational trails program has been absorbed into the Transportation Alternatives Program. Meredith said that although reimbursements for many trail-related programs are limited to 80 percent of expenditures, organizations working with recreational trails can often account for their 20 percent “match” by assigning a dollar value to the volunteer labor used to complete a project.

The shelters, which measure approximately 12 feet by 18 feet, are built from kits supplied by a log cabin home company in North Carolina, Lea said. The walls of the shelter are built from 10-foot lengths of pressure-treated wood that have already been shaped with tongue-and-groove slots and rounded sides.

Ledbetter of the Forest Service said that although the “lion’s share” of the labor in building the shelters still lies in the transportation of the materials to the construction sites, the use of the kits makes things considerably simpler than they were when he first began working on trail shelters more than 20 years ago.

“It was just a pile of 700 linear feet of logs,” Ledbetter said, “and here you go.”

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 19 on 03/30/2014

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