A few weeks after coming home from Windham NY, I got a text from a friend who owns a trail building company based in Bend Oregon. He and his crew had been working at a project at Anthony Lakes Resort and were evacuated due to a wild fire in the area. This lead to him rearranging his projects for the remainder of the season and this put him and his crew in Bend working for Oregon State Park on a new section of the Deschutes River Trail that connects Tumalo State Park to Ryan Ranch (think Shevlin Park outskirts of Bend city limits.
An Oregon Youth Corps Trail Crew had broken ground earlier this year and created a basic tread, then we we’re brought in to finish the tread and work through all the skips sections. This section of river canyon is littered with lava rock of every shape and size, often heavy in accumulation and weight in more than a few areas.
This project was a hand build, while we had a Candy Com to move dirt and tools, and a come-a-long to move the rocks that we’re beyond he strength of our four man crew. On the easy days we were mainly creating consistency in tread width and removing organics from existing tread and bench cut. But on the hard days we spent all our time and energy moving rocks and trying to find dirt beneath lava flow.
This becomes…
This, becomes…
This.
A project like this through the lava flow took three of us the better part of four days to complete, and it took multiple holes and Candy Com loads to fill in the area. It was a real battle, but I think the final project speaks to the attention to detail and skillset that the builders at Dirt Mechanics possess.
Here’s a shot of Derek using the come-a-long on one of the many too big to move by the hands of man alone rocks. I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with Dirt Mechanics. The owner Paul and I met a decade ago when we both were volunteering on trail projects with Central Oregon Trail Alliance and we also spent a few sure.mers working together at the Bachelor Bike Park, so it was nice to finally get a chance to work for him on one of the many trail projects nhis company works on every year!
This particularly sweet section of trail overlooks the confluence of Tumalo Creek and the Deschutes River (seen below).
My Mountain Bike Life... 