The Geeky Trail Building Thread

[raisingarizona]

We haven’t gotten any snow yet so we could be building like crazy but I’m buried with nursing school. I’m starting to think I need to ditch school and create a trail building co. It’s all I really want to be doing to be honest.

Found this thing right in our trail corridor the other day. I think it will be a sweet trail side, visual feature.

The first photo and this one below are of the section we worked on for our last trail event. It's a more aggressive bench cut climb up through a medium sized wash. It's gonna be a cool climb and a ripper of a descent. The views ain't bad either.

 

[chrsdipietro94@]

The trailhead for this one is just up the hill from me. It's a pretty technical descent. Several well built jump lines. Descent is about 1600vf over 3.5 miles. Access is via the ski area access road. Several well built jump lines. A rehab project was completed on it over this past summer. It was completely unrideable for over 10 years. The builders recently released a sweet T2B vid

 

[jasonwx]

Sick vid..thanks for posting...

Between the skiing and riding , you do live in true outdoor nirvana..

 

[raisingarizona]

 

[raisingarizona]

 

[jasonwx]

That looks like some sweet flow!! how long is the trail?

 

[raisingarizona]

Thanks Jason. That’s my (and the crews) handiwork. I’ve been doing the planning and routing on this for three years now.

As of now Little Elden is 5 miles long according to trailforks. We are rerouting the south-eastern third? I think, but adding some mileage. I think we are building 2.6 miles on it but it may be closer to 3. The original gps track was a lot more simple than the actual route since we have 250 foot corridors.

The Heart Trail is another part of this project and will connect into this section in my last photo from somewhere between 500 to 1000 feet up trail and it’s going to be close to 5 miles of descent. The Hearts upper end starts along the Sunset Trail which from the top adds another mile-mile and a half or so of descending. In all from the top there is an almost continuous 7 mile or so descent with around 2k of vertical drop. Some of that is very pedally but in a really fun way imo. It goes through some of the most varied and interesting terrain geologically and ecologically in the Flagstaff area. There’s around 800 vert of high speed descending in the same red rock as Sedona since there was a geological uplift on this side of Elden.

The Little Elden trail is also part of the Arizona Trail. That’s a nationally recognized scenic trail.

 

[raisingarizona]

This is what we have so far on the reroute.

 

[jasonwx]

Very cool... Around the 4 min mark, i see the potential for some cool features.. And I love the jank at the end of the video..

one day I will be back out there!!

 

[raisingarizona]

Thanks bud! Come ride the new heart trail this October!

I’ve been hired on by Ace as a crew leader for next four months on the heart build. Stoked!