Remember when our teens rebuilt timber fences in Yosemite? They made such an excellent impression that the park rangers at Yosemite requested Girls Garage for another construction project this fall!

Needless to say, we were pumped for another National Parks project. In late September, our instructors Emily Pilloton-Lam, Augusta Sitney, and Allison Oropallo piled into the Girls Garage work truck and trekked to Yosemite National Park to fix a 12×12-foot hole in a ranger’s cabin roof up at Glacier Point. (FYI, 12×12-ft long is essentially the size of a small ice cream truck…)

The trio quickly got to work, pulling the damaged cedar shake shingles off the roof and removing the broken trusses. From there, they reframed the interior trusses and rafters, then strapped into harnesses to re-shingle the steep roof (the pitch was 9:12), using 2×6 sheathing, tar paper, and hand-split cedar shake shingles.

A maintenance man estimated the repair would take 2 weeks—our instructors did it in 2 days! “Ahead of schedule and built to perfection,” Emily noted afterwards. “That’s what a trio of female builders can do!”