Transcript
Hat Mountain Restoration Project - Mystic
September 25, 2012
Event: Forest Service employees help restore Hat Mountain ______________________________________________________________________________

Leslie Gonyer, South Zone Hydrologist
If we were just to walk away from this thing it would be a scar on the landscape for a long, long time. It would be year, or decades, and the water would just continue to run down the ruts and so forth and keep eroding the trails. We’re located on Hat Mountain. It is a special, unique area up here and. It’s called Hat Mountain because it looks like there’s a hat on top of the mountain—flat up on top. Over the years, since the advent of the ATV’s, the ATV users have been travelling up to the top of the mountain, and in the process of travelling to the top of the mountain, they have been going straight up the hillside causing some erosion problems. Since the travel management plan has been approved on the Black Hills National Forest, this Hat Mountain has been closed to motorized vehicles now, but however, the scars from the ATV use remain, and there needed to be something done to fix those scars. It’s been a three phase process, and the first phase was to put up a buck and pole fence at the bottom there to stop the users from coming up and then phase II is the reclamation and obliteration of the trails, and we, we started out by purchasing 1600 feet of compost socks. They’ll/Those are going to be placed on the hillside to prevent erosion on the steeper slopes. So before we did the dirt work we hauled those in with UTV’s and placed those in strategic locations, and then after those were in place, we had a CNM crew of the Black Hills National Forest come out here with a CAT and do the dirt work and we ripped, back-bladed, and smoothed out and obliterated the road. The third phase that we’re doing today is we’re placing the compost socks in place.

Wind & Tapping noises

We use rebar to hold them in place. That will slow down the water, and also another thing that we’re doing is reseeding the area too. There will be a lot of native seed here, but we wanted to help it out a little bit, and seed it also. This project was funded in a couple of phases. Last year , in fiscal 11, the Forest Supervisor, Craig Bobzien, supplied money to buy the buck and pole fence, so that was Phase I. and this year the money was supplied by the RAC, Pennington County RAC committee, that’s the Resource Advisory Committee, and so they thought this was a special project and they supplied some funds to buy the wattles and this grass seed and pay for the equipment to obliterate the roads on this mountain. The general user, we/I would like them to respect, you know, this area here and not travel up here in motorized vehicles. You know this area is open to the public just that it is closed to motorized vehicles, because motorized vehicles on the steep hillsides can cause problems.