The Geeky Trail Building Thread

[jasonwx]

We finished up .5 mile of new tread on the Heart Trail project last week and got a bunch of new trail done on Little Elden during a volunteer event yesterday. We spent two 10 hour days building this rock armored wash crossing.

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Very sweet looking build...

It's finally starting to dry out in the North East...
Now if I can only kick my addiction, riding bike park.

 

[raisingarizona]

There’s certainly worse addictions

 

[Harvey]

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Does the water rip through there? How many inches of rain per year?

 

[raisingarizona]

Does the water rip through there? How many inches of rain per year?

It sure does. Flagstaff averages 18 inches of precip a year, a lot of that comes during our monsoon season which generally kicks off in July-ish. Those thunder storms tend to be heavy and fast so drainages like this one can run pretty good. That’s why we used such big rocks, many of which we had to use a grip hoist to move.

 

[jasonwx]

AZ are these one way trails?

 

[raisingarizona]

Nope. Both are bidirectional. Geology might have a different say once we get further on the Heart up the mountain and force a short hike a bike for uphill and/or lesser skilled riders but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there I guess.

 

[Harvey]

We hit the 1 mile mark on the Heart trail this week after doing an 8 day stretch of building and camping. I’m so beat but I’m totally loving it.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

So cool to get a quasi blow-by-blow about building a trail, especially one in that gorgeous setting. Most of us assume that singletracks were just put there by nature and never consider the work and thought that goes into them.

 

[raisingarizona]

So cool to get a quasi blow-by-blow about building a trail, especially one in that gorgeous setting. Most of us assume that singletracks were just put there by nature and never consider the work and thought that goes into them.

Thanks James. I decided to look back through this thread after reading this post and it was fun to see the progress made over this last year. There's a ton of hard work from a lot of different people that’s gone into this thing. Hopefully it’s completed by this November.

 

[jamesdeluxe]

When do you work every day? By noon, it must be brutal under that blazing sun. When I lived in NM, I always made sure to finish riding by late morning.

That's the tradeoff -- while we don't have the killer landscapes like in the southwest/in the east, we're usually riding under a canopy of trees so you don't die on hot sunny days.