Dig stoke, who else likes to play in the dirt???

A cool spell rolled through over the weekend so I was back at it the last couple days.

The work I've been doing is on a string of three trails totaling maybe 4 miles. They were normally ridden top to bottom and I've been working from the bottom up so people don't see trail work up top and drop in to an impenetrable mess.

I moved on to the upper trail this weekend. Hiked through first and flagged all the spots where it was hard to follow the trail. Picked a the worst ones and got to work.


Before
http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML1.jpg

After
http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML2.jpg

Before
http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML3.jpg

After
http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML4.jpg


More finished product
http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML5.jpg

http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML6.jpg


Lots of cool rock in the area. A lot of it isn't usable for features but it still makes the trail more interesting

http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML7.jpg


More before
http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML8.jpg

More after
http://www.habventures.com/photos/Digging/2022/ML9.jpg

double post

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Originally Posted by LeeLau

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Is that wood chips? How does that work, use as base and cover with dirt? Never seen that done before. We often use rocks for that around here, which in PA seem to grow like weeds.


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Originally Posted by VTskibum

Is that wood chips? How does that work, use as base and cover with dirt? Never seen that done before. We often use rocks for that around here, which in PA seem to grow like weeds.


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The base of the trail is organic but it had holes ( dogs digging) and exposed roots from people walking and bikes.

Raked away organic then dug it down to mineral soil then shaped to benchcut. After bringing the trailbed back up so there's no holes and its somewhat crowded we topped it off with organic and used some fallen cedar off trailside. Keeps it looking the way it used to + the forest is so fertile there the ferns and salal will grow back trailside in a year

Brushed out local trails for 3-4 hours today. Holy shit, so much growth!!

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Back to the mountains this weekend. Heat wave coming this week so I wanted to bust out some more work while I can.

Built one short re-route to move the trail where it crosses a corner of private property. Also scoped out another re-route to replace a steep climb with one that is rideable. Found some cool rock formations to snake through and around.

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Local bike club recently got a bug up their ass that some bridges a friend and I built 10 yrs ago need to be replaced. And of course, that means building unnecessarily over-built bridges that will make a fun/interesting trail much less fun/interesting. A few of us came out to supervise and help, and hopefully keep them from making the trail too lame. Partial success, we got them to limit this one to 3 ft wide rather than 4 ft like they wanted.

The old bridge. 24-28" wide and banked inward where it curves, then climbing a few feet up onto a bank

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Day 1 we demo'd the old bridge, augered holes and and poured concrete pilings.

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Day 2 we brought in wood, mounted beams onto the pilings and attached the deck planks.

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Finished product. Looks nice. Solid. Kinda boring.

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Trail maintenance backpacks question:

My main trail tools are:
Milwaukee M18 hedge trimmer(awesome for brush btw)
12” folding hand saw
Rogue Travis Hoe, 48”
6 pack of beer

I’m looking to ride my ebike 5-10 miles and 2-4k of vert to the trails, with these tools on my back. Any pack recommendations?

Mega. Can you partially disassemble the trimmer so its not as long? If not then I've repurposed an old Dakine Poacher as it had lots of compartments and was overbuilt for packing stuff

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Originally Posted by MegaStoke

Trail maintenance backpacks question:

My main trail tools are:
Milwaukee M18 hedge trimmer(awesome for brush btw)
12” folding hand saw
Rogue Travis Hoe, 48”
6 pack of beer

I’m looking to ride my ebike 5-10 miles and 2-4k of vert to the trails, with these tools on my back. Any pack recommendations?

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I have the Evoc trail builder pack. The hedge trimmer is a little tricky, but if it'd fit into the chainsaw sling, I think you could carry all of that at once. The Dakine builder pack is functionally pretty similar, but bigger. So if you need to carry a lot of other stuff, the Dakine might work better. Personally, I've found that if I've run out of space in the Evoc pack, the pack is so big and heavy that riding with it for more than a mile or so is kinda brutal.

^^ Would the Dakine or Evoc handle a 48" long Rogue Travis tool though? Imagine Hedge trimmer would be fine in chainsaw compartment.

Also carry-over from that other trail tool thread, but highly recommend the Rogue Travis tool. We got 2" of rain overnight and my pumptrack was a pond-track b/c my drain overflow areas had pooled up. In sloppy wet clay/loam was pretty quickly able to trench out larger drain runoff areas. Knocked out 2 big areas and my track by the afternoon. Would be ridable except one spot still soggy.

Not a building picture but finally got to ride something I worked on. Wanted to wait till its dry but Wet Coast

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More rain means less Forest fire but also its possible to get the fire crews build trails instead of digging fire lines, last week we had 16 of them up on the bluff swinging pulaski's to finish the roughing in of a new trail

The motha flippin dirt quality in this new zone [emoji7][emoji7][emoji7]
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Originally Posted by VTskibum

^^ Would the Dakine or Evoc handle a 48" long Rogue Travis tool though? Imagine Hedge trimmer would be fine in chainsaw compartment.

Also carry-over from that other trail tool thread, but highly recommend the Rogue Travis tool. We got 2" of rain overnight and my pumptrack was a pond-track b/c my drain overflow areas had pooled up. In sloppy wet clay/loam was pretty quickly able to trench out larger drain runoff areas. Knocked out 2 big areas and my track by the afternoon. Would be ridable except one spot still soggy.

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I carry a 40" handle rogue 70h pretty often (with a chainsaw also in there). Works fine. I think a longer handle wouldn't be a problem other than if there's overhead foliage.

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Originally Posted by thefortrees

The motha flippin dirt quality in this new zone [emoji7][emoji7][emoji7]
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I need to go change my pants over that.

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Originally Posted by Andeh

I need to go change my pants over that.

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Probably gonna need to change your pants before getting there. She’s steep. Very steep. hopefully ready for tires within the next week!

tasty new build!!

Trailwork. It's good for the soul

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Blew out about a 1/3 of mile adder this weekend to an existing 1.2 mile trail. It's becoming a bit whacky with our "high fives" as we call trails when they switch back upon themselves, but we are just so limited with land, especially dry land, we use what we got.
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Originally Posted by VTskibum

Was going to do some trimming on my local yesterday, but instead joined big work party on new trail at one of my favorite riding spots 30 min away.

Hip at top
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into steep right hander with step-down to about where the guys are standing
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into this big gap (landing close to camera)
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with big catch berm right after landing
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Going to be a fun one, though distance of gap is probably not something I'm hitting anytime soon.

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Rode this for first time yesterday. Trail is complete and a ripper, though I did not hit the pictured gap above. Not sure how many hours went into this and all hand-built, but glad to have a small part of it. Think there were 4-5 other berms in addition to the one pictured, plus another 2 step-downs later on. All in about 1/4 mi of trail and about 200' vertical.

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A couple years ago I found this Klondike gold rush era water flume in the woods on a hill above the Klondike River in the Yukon (above the town of Dawson City).

The picture is of the entrance - the flume gets deeper and weaves through the woods much like a waterslide - at points you are in this ditch with the floor of the woods at handlebar height. It is downhill and steep. Drainage will be an issue that needs to be addressed.

It's of course overgrown with trees over the last 100 years. This weekend I've managed to make it back to start clearing it out and integrating this into the bike trail network. Working trail name is "Waterslide" (not original I know) - it won't be a long trail but it will be unique (think ripping downhill through the woods on a flow trail that is sunken into the ground.

Fresh blow down. Swung it 45 degrees...and log ridehttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...8e7593a650.jpghttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...0f8e21b8a7.jpghttps://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...f37b51fc63.jpg

With temps in the low 90s away from the coast, trailwork season is more or less over here.

Except for our local advocacy group who has taken it upon themselves to replace perfectly good bridges with unnecessarily wide and overbuilt bridges. The kind that would make any land manager proud, but bore mountain bikers to tears.

I was able to rescue one of the "unsafe" bridges and repurpose it. To get it off the trail we had to cut it in half. Reconstructing it in the garage I bridged the two six foot halves with a 2x6 and 2x8, then added a 2x4 stringer in the middle for extra strength.

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I didn't want this thing in my garage until cooler temps arrive in October, so I hatched a plan for a night mission to carry it in. No way was I gonna try it in direct sun.

Side benefit would be no witnesses. This area is patrolled by USFS as its a popular dispersed camping area that attracts a lot of homeless types.

It took 3 trips and about 4 hrs to carry all of this about 1.2miles in. The 12ft'er and 2x8 were the worst even though the bridge sections were heavier.

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Rode my bike in the next morning and reassembled it. Getting the two halves aligned to bolt them together with the bridge pieces was tough as there was no even ground to work on.


Finished product ready to install

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I put it off to the side of the original crossing which was just after a turn in the gully that was getting eroded during storms. The original alignment was also cupped out which made for a perfect drain away from the new crossing

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Side view. Bridge feels very solid. Rides very smoothly.

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I'm going to call it the Cougar Crossing. When I scouted this trail for the first time post closures last year there was a fresh lion kill in the gully. You can see legs sticking out from under the piled on grass below. Took me a minute to realize what it was, then I got the hell out of there.

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