December 20, 2018
Bolton- The Vermont Department of Forests, Parks & Recreation (FPR) recently completed improvements to the “Bombardier Road,” a state forest access road that lies east of Preston Brook and is within Camel’s Hump State Park. The road improvements will make this important forest access road into the State Park more flood resilient and reduce the potential for sediment to enter the brook.
Preston Brook drains six square miles of forest known as “Honey Hollow,” including parts of Camel’s Hump State Park. The Bombardier Road hosts a portion of the Catamount Trail and serves as one part of a popular four-season hiking and skiing loop. Intense storm events in 2011, 2013, and 2015 had serious impacts on the State Park road network and Preston Brook, a tributary of the Winooski River.
“The road has held up for a long time. But recent intense storm events are a precursor to what we can expect in the future as a result of climate change,” said Jason Nerenberg, Stewardship Forester in the Essex District office of FPR. “The additional culverts, broad-based dips, and stone-lined ditches should mitigate stormwater impacts to Preston Brook and make this popular trail less prone to washouts. Hikers and skiers can see these improvements and know that the road will last well into the future.” Funding for this project was made possible through a grant from the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation Ecosystem Restoration Program (ERP). ERP grants are awarded through a competitive process to support the design and construction of water pollution abatement and control projects that target non-point sources of pollution.
With funding from ERP, FPR was able to install twenty new ditch relief culverts, some of which helped to disconnect ditches from streams. FPR installed thirty-eight broad-based dips to shed water from the road surface. Approximately 1900 linear feet of roadside ditches were cleaned and shaped, and the steepest sections were lined with stone to prevent downcutting and erosion.
The project work was completed by Alan Cary Excavating of Jeffersonville.