We are now indeed over the top, exceeding the goal amount. My thanks to all of you who have donated. We have a meeting scheduled for this Tuesday to move ahead with buying ties and committing for the dirt work. We need to get off the society owned property onto the county road as soon as possible and this will get us going. Don't let reaching our goal stop anyone from making additional donations as it is all needed and greatly appreciated.
Two things of interest: BLM officials attending the Animas Forks dedication yesterday report that they are counting about 600,000 people visiting Animas Forks this summer--that's amazing and shows that people are here visiting, how to get them to ride the D&S and C&TS is the challenge. This is a topic that has been beaten to death in this discussion forum but remains a problem to be solved.
Secondly, I visited with an official from the EPA and we toured our route to Howardsville. My concern is wetlands issues and the EPA has a very narrow and tight definition of what constitutes "waters of the United States." And not too surprisingly, water is everywhere here in the mountains. But, he was very encouraging in discussing what we have to do to avoid problems, what regulations affect us (primarily what is called Section 404 requirements), and how to handle right-of-way construction issues. He said we were very fortunate that our roadbed is already in place, the county road crew has maintained the drainage ditches and culverts, and that we can relay a line with little or no disturbance of what he saw. We do have to reign in the typical "bulldozer" mentality of our contractors so that they respect the areas of potential concern. We have one stream crossing that is most likely already covered by the county's Section 404 permitting process, and we will be checking that out. I'm very encouraged that this Main Street fund raising effort has been successful and that we can now move forward.
Fritz
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/06/2014 12:06PM by Fritz Klinke.
