2013 Oregon Enduro Series (OES)- Race 1- Hood River

Memorial Day Weekend, I had the opportunity to help out with the operations side of racing this summer, when I was asked to help do timing and course set up for the Oregon Enduro Series. In its fourth year of organizing super d and enduro mountain bike races in Oregon, they took on a new chip timing system this year, with the plan of making timing more accurate and faster than other systems on the the enduro race circuit both nationally and internationally. Thursday night we roll out in the Cogwild van (I also helped them provide shuttling for the weekends racing) we headed west towards Mt. Hood, then headed north on highway 35 until we found the OES compound for the weekend.

(on our way to the races)!!!

Friday- Day 1:

We wake up early, fog still lingering in the Columbia River Gorge Hills as we head out of town to work on getting  the expo area ready for the venders to start showing up. We put up snow fencing and hang banners, begin to frame in an area that we house race support, sponsors, and racers for the next 3 days. Ominous grey clouds linger overhead as we begin to get things ready, but as the day moves on the rain holds off and the sloppy muddy conditions out on the race course begin to dry out a little.

(getting the expo area ready for a race)

My first real assignment of the day is to head up to the top of stage 1 and begin working my way down the course with race tape, marking the first 4 stages of the race (some of which are also stages or parts of stages for day 2 of racing. So after driving one of the first shuttles of the morning, I hop in another van and get shuttled to the top with other racers to start my way down the course. Luckily a weekend before the race I had been up for a trail build day and had gotten a chance to ride day 1’s race course, otherwise this could have been an overwhelming task, because I barely know my way around the Post Canyon trail system.

(racers getting ready to get out and practice the first 4 stages of the first enduro race of the season)

With a backpack full of race tape, I make my way down the muddy disaster that is less than 24 hours away from a race course that will see over 300 racers competing for fastest man and woman in various classes. Its fun being out on the course, taking my time working my way down, getting to watch the racers practice their lines and train the stages in small groups. I stop at some of the more critical sections and watch them session, trying to find the fastest lines through the technical sections, muddy corners and drops that make up the upper stages of the the course.

(scoping the line)

(dropping in)

(stoked)!!!

I move down the hill, following a mixture of memory and racers choices, tracks in the mud help me trust my judgement, multiple muddy mountain bike tracks can’t be wrong can they. It takes me the better part of the afternoon to get back to the expo area, where vendors and sponsors are still slowly trickling in and beginning their setup for the weekend.

(the slow setup day one, this is what it takes to get ready to put on a race)!!!

We hang out at the expo area for the remainder of the afternoon, I drive a few more van’s full of racers to the top so they can get their practice on,, and do whatever else we can do to get the area ready for the events that are already beginning to unfold.

 

(Mac and Amanda looking busy as ever)

 

(racer’s alley day 1 at the enduro)!!!

 

(a muddy bike in front of the 2013 sponsors list)

 

(home base for everything enduro racing for the weekend)

When the day is finally over, we hop in the Cogwild van, head to the OES compound and drop off Mac, then we head to the Vagabond Inn, where Amanda and I got a hotel room for the rest of the weekend (if you are gonna bring your fiance to the races and she doesn’t race or ride, at least provide some creature comforts and a place where you can create some space from all the bike talk and bro brah’s that attend these types of events). Once we are checked into our hotel we get a hotel then head back downtown to get dinner at the Big Horse Brew Pub, since when I’m out of town I always like to check out the craft breweries in the area where I am visiting, and Hood River has its fare share of good beer being brewed within city limits. We eat dinner and try a few different beers, then we settle up and call it a night, heading back to the hotel to lie in bed and watch tv.

Saturday- Day 2- Stages 1 thru 4- Let the racing begin!

Up early again, this time to get out to the expo area and get prepped to go and set up our timing station. Sean, my timing partner for the weekend and I have the hardest of the 4 stages to get into, so once we are sure we have everything we need for the day we head out and get dropped off as close as we can get to our zone to set up in, which is still about a half mile from where we are and we have a few hundred pounds of gear to move into the woods and then set up, all before the first rider comes through the end of our stage, and with the pro’s going first we have our work cut out for us.

 

(getting the stage 3 finish line set up before the racers make their way to us).

 

(Sean setting up the chip time systems sensors)

Once we make the 3 trips each it takes to get all our equipment into our zone, the work of setup begins. Sean has practiced setting up the timing system already, but for me its my first time, so I mostly just take orders and do whatever I can to get our area in order. Once we are set up, which almost comes down to the last minute, we take our seat in front of our computers and prepare to watch the racers come through the finish line of stage 3.

 

(Devon and Sean doing last minute tweaks to the timing system)

 

(this is where we spent out day, not a bad place for an office, this is the life I’m trying to live)!!!!

Shortly there after we started to see racers come through our stage, and for the rest of the day we just watch racers cross the line every minute or so. Other than not having internet connectivity, our timing station basically does all the work for us, so all we have to do is watch and make sure it keeps working and make sure that the generator stays running. So we sit there, talking to each other and the more talkative racers, and just enjoy a beautiful day in the woods. Everything is running smoothly until at one point we just stop seeing racers. We try to find out what is going on, which takes awhile, but we find out that the inevitable has happened, someone has been injured in a crash and has to be medically evacuated, the unfortunates of racing. It takes almost an hour until we see the next racer, and a somber tone overtakes many of the last racers to come through our stage.

 

(our office in the woods, making sure the timing keeps going)

Once we are done, and the last racer of the day crosses the stage 3 finish line we pack everything up and start packing it back out to the road to get picked up, only when we get to the road, Devon’s truck is stuck, high centered on a little rise in the road. Devon and Boone try to dig out the truck while we finish packing all our gear out of the woods. Its a toss up whether we will get ourselves out of the woods before the AAA truck shows up to tow us out, but in the end we get ourselves out. We get back to the expo and almost everyone has gone home already, so we do the same, we head back to the hotel to get cleaned up then we cross the Columbia River into White Salmon Washington where we track down Everybody’s Brewing Company, where we have our dinner and a few beers before going home and settling down for another night at the Vagabond Inn.

Sunday- Day 3- Stages 5 thru 7- Last day of racing:

We get up to a soggy start of teh last day of the race. We head once again to the expo area, and get briefed on what the day has in store. Today Sean and I are walking into the start of stage 7, so we don’t have to far to go, except we have to walk up to the start on the trail which proves to be one of the slipperiest hikes of my life.

 

(me all muddy after and slipping and falling 3 or 4 times on my hike into the start of stage 7)

 

(Set up, ready and waiting for racers on day 2 of the Hood River Enduro)

We get set up, which is much easier to do than the finish, then we sit down and wait, which takes awhile since today the beginners go first and the pro’s go last (opposite of day 1). We start to see racers, then the 7th kid to start our stage crashes less than 200 yards from the start line in a super greasy g-out that we knew could cause some carnage. I am the first to get to him, he is yelling and screaming at the top of his lungs, he’s young, so when I get to him, I do my best to calm him down and just talk to him, try to keep his mind off his broken wrist. Since he is up on his feet, I figure he can be moved, so we begin walking out of the woods as soon as I make contact with Kerri and know she is coming to meet me halfway or better to get him the rest of the way out of the woods and toward people with more medical training than Wilderness First Aid. Once he is in her hand, I turn around and make my way back to the start line as fast as I can. When I get there, we have a line of at least 20 racers,and for the rest of the day it stays this way, we have long lines of racers waiting to go, we do our best to keep them from getting frustrated and for the most part they are all understanding.

 

(an idea of what the line looked like)

Other than the long waits (up to 20 minutes at the longest) the race ran smooth from here on. It was super greasy on all the stages today, so by the time the racers got to us, they had all already had a bear miss, a crash, or the fear of God instilled in them by trying to maintain race pace in the current conditions. Once the pros are done, we pack up and head down to drop off our info the the Seth, Devon, and Justin finishing the times behind the scenes to get the final results out.

 

(Justin announcing the results and the winners of the weekends race)

 

(the gathered crowd, ready for awards and schwag)

With the race over we just hung out and started to clean up the venue. We hang out for the prizes, then head home to get cleaned up. Tonight we decide to go out and have dinners and beers at Double Mountain, another awesome brewery in Hood River. Monday we get up and head back to the expo area to take down the snow fencing and banners we only put up a few days ago, picking up trash and making it look like there hadn’t just been a race there. It was a long and exhausting weekend long hours and long days, but it was a great experience learning more about the backside of racing.

 

Season 1- 2013- Building the Mt. Bachelor Bike Park- Post 3- August- Month 2 let the building continue

August brings summer into full swing, first we are smoked out from wildfire’s burning in the Cascades to the south and west of us. It was a low snowfall winter, and a dry spring and summer, which makes scratching the earth interesting, we push on. We spend 4 weeks working in Rattle Snake, getting it connected to Blade Runner, so that we have our first trail connected from “top to bottom” (once Lava Flow was connected to the top of Rattle Snake, which happened right around the middle of the month, a day or two before we had our first industry day). It was a solid push that saw us test many of the building techniques that did or did not work in our “soil”/sand/ash and lava rock, we worked and reworked our corners, making them wider, more open at the top, and wide enough to let a rider come through high or low, taking the inside of the turn back enough to make it all come together.

 

(Troy and I playing with pavers on Blade Runner, although we ended up not using them on this section of trail, every little bit of practice helps)

In preparation for Industry Day, we began working on improving some of what we had already done, which meant going back to Lava Flow, Rattle Snake, and Blade Runner and fixing some of the ares we saw to potentially take the most abuse. In these areas we would usually go in with paver stones and create new more dependable riding surfaces. Usually we did this in corners that were more sand than soil, but we also got to go into some other areas and do some other projects. One was an area we dubbed the “half-pipe”, which is a nice steep g-out section of trail on Rattle Snake. This project took at least 10 pallets of paver stones. Each of these pavers weighed something like 80 pounds, and carrying them from the truck to the trail proved most arduous, but we carried them, one at a time to the sections of trail where they were needed, and then put them into place.

 

(The line up at Industry Day, the first group of mountain bikers descend upon the lift line to ride downhill mountain bike trails on Mt. Bachelor for the first time ever)

 

 

(Random rider checking out Lava Flow on Industry day)

The last few days before Industry Day saw us pushing hard to get everything as ready as we could for the 40 or so riders who would get the first real taste of what we have been up to this summer. We were all a little anxious about what would be said about all of our efforts. The mountain bike community can be very opinionated, and those who lift the shovels and put their back into it the least often have the loudest mouths about what they would have done better, so we did all we could to improve what we had done. It is common knowledge among trail builders everywhere that first season trails often have years to go until all the kinks have worked themselves out and everything flows the way you wanted them to, but when you invite bike shop employees, racers, and writers from the community, you open yourselves up to commentary from people who have little experience in anything other than riding trails or fixing bikes, so you must remember to apply many grains of salt to their opinions. So August 15th we hustled to get everything tuned up. Last Chance was connected to the Red Road so it could be ridden, and Lava Flow, Rattle Snake, and Blade Runner were as dialed in as we could get them with the time we had to do so.

 

(Dustin carrying in pavers to the half-pipe on Rattle Snake)

For 5 weeks, we pushed hard everyday moving forward toward some mileage goal in a mind or on paper somewhere that would make this summers efforts worthwhile. We grew in our understanding of what it meant to build gravity trails everyday, but with the focus always on moving down the trail, there was little time spent going back and correcting what was done before, even once we had enough trail to ride, ans saw first hand what could be done to improve what was done, we moved forward, to new trail.

We also learned how to work together as a group and come together as a team, which was challenging because, we were all scheduled to work 4 days a week, while building went on 7 days a week, so there was an overlap throughout the crew, that saw all of us work “together” at least 1 day a week. Things also started to become divided by who was working on which trail. After Rattle Snake was “finished” (a term used loosely in trail building), the hand crew began to be divided into 2 groups, one that would support the machines with raking, rock picking, watering, and plate compacting, while the rest of the trail crew began working on another hand-built single-track trail, called Last Chance.

 

(Last Chance, begins over between Pine Marten Lodge and Outback)

Last Chance, was to become a second black trail of the first season, but within the first week of building this trail, a division in attitude began to occur, where day by day one or more members of the hand crew would become upset about this trails “blackness” and began almost immediately to lose interest with putting real effort into building the trail, or making it a good trail. The attitude became infectious, and it led to further divisions and cliques in the hand crew. Some members would do everything they could to only work with the machines, which was fine, since others wanted to only/mainly work hand crew, finding driving/compacting to be “boring”. At times, the attitudes about Last Chance became toxic, and over the course of building this trail we all lost and found interest in the project. It took most of the time we spent on the trail to realize collectively that not every trail you build will be your favorite, but building a trail well is all that really matters. People will ride it one way or another, but the bottom line is if you put effort into something it represents you, and you should put your best efforts forth in these situations.

At the end of the day, even on your worst day, this is what we do, we build trails, we ride bikes, all in the middle of the Cascade Mountains. We are really so lucky to have these opportunities, and as I look back at the summer, all the hard work has paid off. Sure we may not have the gnarliest downhill trails in the bike park scene, but for season 1 of trail building we are making some fun stuff to ride, and every year moving forward we will continue to build them bigger and better!