Project Report- Dirt Mechanics- Deschutes River Trail Expansion-

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).

 

Bike Park Report- Windham Mountain Bike Park- Building Kaaterskill Cruise over/under

Designing a trail system is one of the things Gravity Logic does best, just take a look at the most popular bike parks in North America and most of them have been designed and built with our assistance (and I’m super stoked to be able to now be apart of this). In a perfect scenario bike park trails don’t intersect, but sometimes trails need to cross each other, and then it’s up to the builders to get creative. About Midway down Kaaterskill Cruise, it intersects the blue jump trail Widlerness Roll, and the best place to cross it was right through of if the best tabletops on the entire trail which caused some concerns among trail crew and the locals alike. 

So our challenge as builders was to go through the jump without changing the lip or landing. To do so Keith designed a metal frame that we could set in the jump and then cover on three sides with wood to create a tunnel through the jump. Neither Gregg or I had ever built an over under feature so we were excited to see how it would turn out. Once the frame was completed, we set about removing the dirt needed to get the tunnel in place.

Once the earth was removed we set about moving the frame into place. After that we moved the dimensional lumber in and began construction on the side walls. Trail crew stayed late on their Friday afternoon to see the project through to the end so that we could open both trails for Saturday.

We completed the project without having to change the lip or landing at all, which was our goal. The tunnel allowed us to open over one mile of new trail to the public, and in doing so has increased access for beginners to get a better understanding of bike park riding on a green trail!

The crew that stayed late and made it possible! What a fun project to be apart of, bike park riding is getting better all the time in the Catskills thanks to the efforts of the Windham Mountain Bike Park Trail Crew, make sure to give them a high five the next time you’re riding there!

 

Bike Park Report- Windham Mountain Bike Park- Building Kaaterskill Cruise

I arrived at the Windham Resort in the heart of New York’s Catskill mountains in the middle of June, becoming the fourth machine operator from Gravity Logic to come lend a hand in the building of Kaaterskill Cruise, the newest trail in the Windham Mountain Bike Park. This green trail we are building was the missing piece in the existing trail system.

Windham Resort is most well known the the mountain bike community as the most recent host to UCI World Cup racing on American soil, but it’s more than just a few race tracks. Gravity Logic had spent a previous summer there, building two blue trails, Wilderness Roll a blue jump trail, and Batavia Skill a blue hybrid trail with singletrack and machine built turns. The park was missing an easy green trail to get beginner riders started in the building of the skillset that park riding takes, so that’s why we have returned in 2017 to fill the void and in the process build one of the longest green trails in a bike park here in America.

Gregg Winter was running the show on the ground when I showed up in Windham. A long time machine operator with Gravity Logic, he was overseeing the building of Kaaterskill Cruise. With four Bobcat mini excavators and operators we were busy chasing each other down the mountain, working in groups of two, one operator out front grubbing and creating the initial trail and the other following behind doing the finishing work. 

The hardest part of building a good green trail is keeping the trail in the green designation and not allowing it to become blue. No jumps no banked turns, just rollers and canted turns, it’s a great challenge for a builder to keep a trail green while making it flow and fun.

Week after week we continued to create more fun green trail for the masses to enjoy. Over the course of the five and half weeks I was in Windham we completed new sections that allowed us to open Kaaterskill Cruise farther down the mountain before tying it in to Wilderness Roll to get riders back to the bottom of the mountain. While the entire trail will not be completed and open to the public until next summer, Windham Mountain Bike Park now boasts almost 3 miles of green trail that is open to the public!

 

Sustainable Trails Conference- 2017- Bend OR

The Professional Trail Builders Association (PTBA), brought its annual sustainable trail conference to Bend this year. This week long event had hands on learning sessions out at multiple sites in he area (Smith Rock, Tumalo State Park, Tetherow, Inn of the 7th Mountain, and Rock Ridge Park), while sessions, talks, and indoor and outdoor tradeshow and demos went on at the Riverhouse on the Deschutes. 

I started my attendance of the conference out at Inn of the 7th Mountain at the mechanized trail building training on Monday morning. With a collection of nearly ten machines ranging from mini excavators to walk or stand behind skid steers and earth moving machines. Experienced machine operators demonstrated best practices with the machinery and then gave instructions to builders who were there to use a machine for the first time or learn some new skills behind the controls. It was a nice laid back format that allowed time for everyone to get some hands on the controls while a few trails were built in the meantime.

Classroom sessions began Tuesday and ran through Thursday a few a day with networking time in between. Sometimes it was hard to pick the session to sit in on, as the topics were all pertinent to where we are as trail professionals in this ever growing and changing industry. 

Nearly 250 trail professionals from mostly North America were in attendance at the conference. Business owners, members of trail crews, land managers, and others came to listen, learn, and share their own experiences with others who could benefit from the sharing of information. It’s great to see this industry taking the initiative to create opportunities to share new information and best practices with others in the business of designing, building, and maintaining trails all over the country and world.

While I’ve known members of the PTBA over the years this was the first event of theirs that I’ve attended, and I found the whole thing informative and enjoyable. Being the bike/trail nerd that I am I took notes in every session, and tried to think of ways of sharing this information with others when I return to dirt work for the season. It’s was a great conference and one that I will most likely attend again in the years to come.

 

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Building the Bachelor Bike Park- Season 4- Post 4- the completion of Rock Fall

Towards the end of season 3 we began building Rock Fall, a trail designated as a double black diamond, the most extreme designation in bike parks and ski areas. While Rock Fall is definitely the most challenging trail we’ve built yet in the bike park, and by far the best example of a downhill race track, it could’ve been designated as another black diamond trail. While it is much steeper than any of our other black trails, and also more challenging, it’s still in the grand scheme of things, not double black, the drops are small, and the jumps are caseable, but it is also much more challenging than Rattle Snake, our first black downhill trail, and most likely our best trail on the mountain at this point.

We broke ground on Rock Fall half way through the 2015 build season. To keep people from poaching the trail, we began our building below the beginning, at the first road crossing, but it’s difficult to build a brand new trail almost directly under the chair lift and not attract a lot of attention. We spent a good part of the last month of summer creating the new trail, and then put it to bed for the winter.

(upper Rock Fall, this was the first section of trail we broke in 2015)

Rock Fall was also the first trail where I was given the opportunity to lead the build, and also make decisions to follow or  not follow the flag line depending on our opinions. Up until this point  Tom had always wanted us to stick almost directly to the flag line, but after almost 3 full seasons of proving myself as a builder,  I was finally given some free reign in the decision making process. Not being someone who let’s power go to my head, anytime we found the flag line not working we came together as a group and all came up with a line we liked and then we would pick the best choice, you know democracy. In my opinion, the best trail has the character of all the builders involved, anyone that thinks they know better or best, is full of themselves. It was a great way to end the third season of building.

When we returned to the 2016 build season, we found Rock Fall buried in snow, so we focused on maintenance and other projects until the long hot days of summer melted the snow, and allowed us access to begin work again. We had a goal to complete the trail in time to use it in the Oregon Enduro Series race we were hosting at the end of August. The aim was to include every aspect of a downhill race track we could in the final build, and I think we did a great job. We’ve got big jumps, steep lines, banked and flat turns, and some small drops. It’s gonna be the most challenging trail in the system when it’s all said and done, and after a few seasons of being ridden it’s gonna be really fast.

Rock Fall is a hand built trail except for one section. In 2015 Carson Storch brought his trick jump.up to the mountain and we built him a landing so he could work on his bag of tricks when he wasn’t traveling for FMB contests. The landing was right under the chair lift and when we connected the trail I to this section. We figured why not use this as the line, so we built a step up and then 2 stepdowns with the mini excavator and they turned into the best 3 jumps on the mountain. We got Rock Fall ready to open the week before the race, we cut a section that we  are planning to build in 2017 out to save time and made a fall like e section as a go around instead. Although the trail was very soft when it was opened, it has revieced a lot of positive feedback from the community of riders, and I feel we finally built a trail that challenges even expert riders. I can’t wait to see what comes of this trail in the next few seasons.

 

Building the Bachelor Bike Park- Season 4- Post 2- the ongoing labor of love in wooden features

One of the joys of wooden features is the fact that no matter what you fasten them with, typically screws or nails, break or loosen over time and due to use. Bachelor by no means is a bike park known for its large amounts of woodwork, but there are places throughout the trail system where it exists. For the most part wooden features have answered a need for treadwork  to exist, our longest/largest wooden feature dubbed the boardwalk, is an over 300′ length of decking that we built to avoid needing to use a machine to come in and bench cut the tread wide enough to exist. The problem was that the hillside where the boardwalk is located is all sand, and any amount of earth work in the area would just lead to more sliding of the sandy hillside into the bench cut, becoming a never ending battle for trail crew to deal with. This season, with the increased focus on maintenance, we spent quite a bit more time, riding around the trail system, one or two at a time, with a backpack full of nails, screws, and hammers and drills, checking the soundness of each feature periodically throughout the season, and replacing missing hardware wherever we found it broken.

(Bryan tending to the boardwalk on one of our many maintenance missions to repair existing woodwork in the trail system)

This season, we are approaching maintenance in a different way than we had in seasons past. The past 2 summers, we had a maintenance crew who’s primary responsibility was to walk the trails with a rake, and remove loose rocks from the trails. While this is a much needed practice, since the lava rock constantly moves from the surrounding hillsides, trail maintenance in my opinion is a much bigger picture. As trail builders, it is my opinion that we should be constantly looking at existing trails, and pinpointing things to be changed to improve the ride, and creating wish lists for changes in trails, then as time allows execute these changes. One of the best ways for a bike park to stoke out its regulars, is to fix, change, or eliminate sections of trails that don’t work, and those who use these trails regularly will either see or feel the difference. In my opinion, it’s a win win, and it shows the public that the builders also see the flaws in existing trails, and see the benefits of making changes. It seems like some builders think once a trail is done, it’s done, and doesn’t need changed or improved to remain relevant. That has never been how I see trail building. Like any other art form, the process is always changing, and being flexible with those changes and executing the fixes, is like updating a piece of art. Trail building is an interesting skill set, part construction, part landscaping, part art, and all a reflection of what we as trail builders see in the terrain, and how we approach moving through it. It can be a beautiful process, if the crew works as a team, communicates, and respects the collective vision of the trail. Understanding the trail designation (green, blue, black) as well as the intended user group, and creating a trail that properly represents that, is the ultimate challenge of trail building, especially on a commercial recreation level.

(FTL woodwork, more cause for continuing maintenance on woodwork throughout the trail system)

When we built First Time Line (FTL as we affectionately call it) our first designated green trail, our goal was to build something to represent any and everything a new bike park rider would see once they decided to graduate from sunshine accelerator (chairlift) and take Pine Marten Express (chairlift to mid mountain and the top of the trail network in the bike park). This was  one of our wooden feature to do just that, low to the ground, and super wide, just a great way to introduce new riders to the way wood feels under tire. But even features on easy trails need attention and maintenance over time. So periodically, throughout the season, we revisited these features one by one in an attempt to keep them safe for the public to ride, as well as try and slow the deconstruction of these features over time.

(one of a few large and natural wood features on Dark Side of the Moon)

On Dark Side of the Moon (DSM) Kiwi Paul of Dirt Mechanics who was the main builder/designer on the trail wanted to go the all natural route when he decided to add some wooden features to this trail. Being more rugged in material used, the features required more sturdy hardware to hold them together, and beyond some destruction from fallen trees, they are definitely holding up to the test of time better than many of the dimensional lumber built features that exist on the other trails.

(run-in to the option line drop at the bottom of Big Wood)

(run-out/landing for the Big Wood option line)

• While this was a new construction project, in an entry otherwise on maintenance of wooden features, it still fits the bill, so I’m gonna write about it. This is the first feature in the bike park where we mixed dimensional lumber and natural wood into one wooden feature. Aesthetically, it’s pleasing and beyond that it’s big and sturdy. It’s also the biggest drop in the trail system (sure there is a 7′ drop in the skills area, but those are fluff features, where as this is real time and real speed. It is a step in the “right direction” in my opinion on features we’ve built so far. It’s big and tests your courage, but safe and built to work right into the natural terrain and slope of the hillside. One of my least favorite things about jumps and features in too many trails are the vision of a feature that doesn’t fit into the natural lay of the land. Builders seem to get wild hairs up their asses and on a manic whim decide to throw in a feature to show their skills. My personal viewpoint on features are they only belong where they work in “organically” to the terrain and for the natural flow of the land, and I feel like this feature did a great job of doing just that.