Category: making things

I’ve been on vacation for the last week or so (since the 3rd), and much of this time has been spent working on a new 1.3 mile segment of single track trail at River Bends. As of this afternoon it is now signed and open and can be considered complete. All work on this segment from here on out will be tweaking or maintenance; initial building is done.

The image above shows the entrance to this new segment. This spot had previously been a wall of brush, best illustrated here at the end of a trail ride video from River Bends where the rider turns left after exiting the single track. Now riders can continue straight and ride another long segment of twisty single track. This takes the place of riding some relatively flat two track which had a couple unpleasantly blind corners. An updated copy of the River Bends Trail Map (PDF) shows this new segment of trail, the eastern yellow line which flows north between the asphalt and two track.

While I did a fair bit of work on this trail segment laying it out and doing a bunch of the rough cutting and such, it would not have been possible to build this without loads of help from other volunteers. Some folks (in particular Jeremy Verbeke and Paul McAllister) were able to help out in the middle of the week, while others donated their time and effort during a scheduled trail day on October 9^th where our numbers (21 people!) allowed us to finish most of the work resulting in something recognizable as a trail.

Thank you to everyone who was involved with this; we’ve got more trail!

Here, have a photo of the newest addition to the trails at River Bends: a log pile. This has been in place for a few days, but this afternoon I finished it off by adding another log to the front to make it more approachable. I also added more glue dirt to help keep it all together. Another view of the logpile (from the direction which it is typically ridden) can be seen here. At River Bends when the parks people cut downed trees from the two track, they tend to leave nicely maneuverable ~4′ pieces sitting in the woods along the trail. Finding a few fresh, non-rotted ones of these is trivial and they can easily be used to build solid log piles. For anything else I can find other fallen, dead trees and cut them to length with a handsaw.

This afternoon’s trailwork also included tweaking a corner to increase its radius (photo) and adjusting another to flow more smoothly to cut down on people overshooting the corner and washing out. Damage to both the trail surface and edge made it obvious that this was a common problem on these corners. Here is a helmet cam video of me washing out on the pictured corner and falling. Whoops.

This morning, along with help from Jeremy Verbeke and Scott Retford (and Bob Costello last night in collecting the Lexan) the kiosk at the River Bends Trailhead was completed. This involved hanging the signs, covering it all with Lexan, and fitting some wooden strips that I cut and drilled last night (picture). Here is a photo of Scott and Jeremy standing next to the kiosk right after we completed the sign hanging.

This kiosk (along with much of the trail signage) was donated and build by Spencer Wood and Troop #242 as part of Spencer’s Eagle Scout project. It’s a nice improvement on the standard MMBA Kiosk Construction Plans, is extremely well built, and should last for years. This is one of the best constructed trailhead kiosks that I’ve seen.

The signage includes a trailhead-specific version of the map, a QR code allowing easy download of a PDF of the map to one’s smart phone, and some basic trail rules. The kiosk also features a sign from Aktion Club, a Kiwanis program for people with disabilities who helps with maintenance of the first mile of two track trail.

This completes the current River Bends trail system allowing us to move on to the next phase. I just recently received approval to expand the single track even further, so once the mosquitos start dying off and leaves start falling from trees construction on this next segment can begin.

After one of the recent windy days another dead tree fell on the trails at River Bends, and thankfully I was able to remove this one with just a hand saw and a bit of creative thinking. The tree was partially rotted, so there was only a solid core to saw through. Fifteen minutes of actual work and it was gone.

Once the tree was cleared I spent some time wandering around some undeveloped parts of the park, and from what I can tell there’s a really great opportunity to build some more single track heading generally north from the end of the current loop. this needs a little more thought, but I think we may be able to build a return trail so that most of the route north back to the trail head can occur on single track.

Here is a (blurry) photo of the downed tree and some tools right after I arrived to remove it.

There were a surprising number of people out riding the trails today, and this was rather nice. It’s really great to see a bunch of people out enjoying them.