Last updated on May 22, 2011
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Apparantly the promoters of the Back To The Beach Half Marathon and 5K see fit to apply permanent spray paint to rocks, roots, and ruts along the route of a trail race. Yes, this one-day race has now caused much of the two track trail at Stony Creek to have nearly every mildly exposed non-dirt element on the trail to become a blaze orange eyesore.
The photo above was taken this morning when Pete, Mark, Bill, and I headed out to The Pines in Stony Creek to fix up a bunch of the muddy holes that developed during this especially wet spring. Using a mix of park-provided gravel, fill rocks, and a small amount of cement (as a light binder) we scraped out the mud holes, added fill, mixed in the scraped out mud, topped it with a light dusting of cement, raked it together, then tamped it firm. After settings up for a few hours these segments are now dry and hard-pack dirt, and should be much more resistant to washing away / turning to peanut butter in the coming years’ spring rains.
After the trail work I headed home and washed the Titus, then set back out on it towards Stony Creek to meet up with an old friend and coworker Jeff, who was there for the day with his son. The two of us rode a lap around Stony Creek’s main road, then ended up at West Branch Lot C, where Danielle (and a bunch of other friends) were at (or running) the Michigan DNRE’s Becoming an Outdoors Woman mountain bike class. After hanging around there for a while we retired to Rochester Mills Brewery, which I accessed by way of a bunch of single track, including The Pines to check out the sections we’d worked on this morning. I’m quite happy with how they came out, and I think they’ll go a long ways towards making the trail year-round ridable.
After Rochester Mills I headed towards home, racing the front that brought tonight’s rain. All said, this was a 39.75 mile ride over 2:47:22, for a moving average of 14.25 MPH. This is my fastest average time of the year, and the earliest ride last year of similar length and average speed didn’t happen until June, and had much more of it’s route along the relatively flat Paint Creek Trail.
UPDATE: Turns out that this may be spray chalk, but as I couldn’t rub it off a rock with my foot I’m hesitant to believe that. Or maybe it’s a long-lasting chalk. If this gets cleaned up / goes away within a couple weeks I’ll feel a lot better about it and take back harsh statements made about the use of long-term marking for a one-day event, but if markings I’ve seen other places in previous years are any indication this stuff will be visible for months.
my god, that looks like health and safety gone mad. Please tell me there’s a more logical reason for this than to avoid the event organisers being sued if someone trips over.
piku: I imagine it’s actually less about lawsuits and more some earnest effort to keep people from tripping. However, I think it’s the wrong approach. Additionally, this part is a trail run, which (at least to me) implies running on trails where things like rocks and roots are occasionally found.
I think there’s other things they could have used (pin flags maybe, or caution signs or tape) that would require cleanup, but would have no residue.
I prefer to think people have common sense and realise trail running involves looking where your feet go. Otherwise it’s like printing “sharp” on the edges of knives, or “hot” on McDonalds coffee cups ;-)