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Category: outdoors

Phase II of River Bends is Open!

Published October 3, 2010

With a total of 39.5 volunteer hours spent during a rainy trail day of bench cutting, installing a new bridge, (which Pete designed specifically for the space), raking, trimming, and generally finishing off the trail, Phase II of the single track trails at River Bends are now open. While the trails are still a bit slippery from the last couple days of rain, they should be quite nice to ride.

Once I was done taking a break after the trail day I then headed back to River Bends and walked the new part of the trail with My Tracks recording the route. This data, combined with stuff gathered on previous mapping trips, allowed me to make this map showing all the park-recognized paths within the park. While just the first revision, I’m still quite happy with how it’s all coming along. There’s now a ridable, cohesive loop of multiple miles of single track.

Now to get to finishing the other loops that hang off of it. They already exist, but need both some cleanup and trimming before they’ll be properly ridable. Right now getting through some parts of them is akin to riding down a corn row.

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Red Bat

Published September 26, 2010

Here, have a photo of a furry bat that Mark found while we were doing trail work at River Bends on Phase II of the new single track. Since it was clinging to something that we wanted to cut I carefully removed the branch then re-hung it from another tree a ways off the trail all while the bat kept still.

Here is a photo of its back showing how furry it is. I originally thought that this was a Little Brown Bat (Myotis lucifigus), but I’ve since been corrected. It is actually a Red Bat (Lasiurus borealis).

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Phase II of River Bends is In Progress

Published September 26, 2010

Phase II of the multi-use single track trail at River Bends that I’ve been facilitating the construction of is moving along nicely. Since completing Phase I back in June I’d written up this proposal (PDF, page 3 contains a map) for two more phaes of trail, gotten it approved by the township, and gone to work so that it can be completed by winter.

All of the Existing Segment of Phase II was trimmed back (it was quite overgrown) to a nicely rideable / hikeable state at the beginning of September, and throughout the past week I’ve begun work on the New Segment. In River Bends I’ve found that when getting started I like to clear deadfall and rake in the route. (Another photographic example.) After this then a line trimmer can be brought in to remove any small plant growth and scour the ground, and then bench cutting can be done as-needed on off-camber sections of land to provide a flat place to ride. All but ~1000′ of this new segment of trail is now raked, so I’m quite happy with how things are going. Plans are in place to do more work tomorrow starting at 3pm, so with any luck there’s only another week or two until this whole segment is ready to ride.

It was quite satisfying to be taking a break today, standing on freshly raked ground, and seeing trail rolling across the hills as far as the terrain allowed me to see. I think I’m liking this trail building thing. Not only do I get to build something fun but it costs nothing save for labor, supports another interest of mine, and being on public land it benefits anyone in the area who chooses to use it. It’s almost like open source taken to public works.

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Trail Caster

Published September 18, 2010

The things that one finds in the woods never cease to amuse me.

Another ~3 hours in at River Bends, and the existing Phase I trail is clear of deadfall, heavy concentrations of leaves, and impeding downed trees. A few corners were even slightly reworked for better flow. Even with rain falling the trail was in great shape, so now to find time to keep going on the new segment of trail…

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New Bike, Falling, Missing Flags

Published July 18, 2010

Today while trying out the new (to me) single speed at River Bends I washed out the front wheel and fell. Oops. (Crash area photo above or here. Yes, it’s blurry. It’s kinda dark in those woods.)

I also confirmed that the 34:16 gearing is too much for me and I’m now pursuing acquisition of a 19T cog. This should give me a much easier (within 1% of the ‘standard’ 32:18) gearing, which should be good for getting going again with 29er single speed trail riding. Since I couldn’t make it up a couple of the hills (the sharp turn then up ones) I think this will do. Now I just have to find the cog and tool, which I’d prefer to do before Tuesday so I can take the bike out to the Tree Farm for the group ride.

When out at River Bends I had a rather unplesant surprise. I’ve been working the MMBA and Shelby Township to build new mountain bike (and hiking and running, of course, since they are shared) trails in the park. On Friday I marked another large segment of trail for us to build out, but someone removed almost all of my tape flags over the weekend. I suspect it’s someone trying to keep new work (or bikes or something?) out of “their” part of the park, but it’s hard to say. I also found dirt bike tire tracks (photo) on both the two track and single track, and a couple torn up areas from the dirt bikes riding off the trail and doing doughnuts on the two track. I guess these are just the sort of things that have to be dealt with as part of the process (and inherent problems) involved in building and maintaining trails.

Also while out at River Bends I ran into a couple who were out looking to ride the trail for the first time. I started to take them through it, but after a little bit we ended up parting ways as they opted to ride some two track together and I sent off for another lap of the single track. I’m really glad to see people heading out to the trails to check them out.

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Cock ‘n Bull Ginger Beer

Published July 11, 2010

Here’s a bottle of Cock ‘n Bull Ginger Beer, purchased at the gas station at the corner of Grange Hall and Mackey Roads after Erik, Kristi, and I rode the East Loop (Gruber’s Grinder) at the Holly-Holdridge Mountain Bike Trails, which are more commonly known just as Holdridge. This was a quite challenging (but fun) trail, which took us 2:20 to complete the 15.5 mile route riding at a quite relaxed pace. It has everything from flowing sections of hard pack through the woods to 6′ high piles of field stones and reasonably high log piles. (Photo of Erik going over the biggest of the log piles.)

After the ride (and purchase of snacks) we headed over to Wildwood Lake in Holly Recreation Area and swam for a while to cool off (photo). Unfortunately while out swimming (and taking underwater photos) my supposedly waterproof to 10′ Olympus Stylus 850 SW sprung a leak. The camera started complaining that the memory card’s contacts needing cleaning, and after I opened the memory card / battery card compartment I found it to have water in it. It’s now sitting in a container of desiccant, so hopefully it’ll start working again soon and I can just put it to use as my standard travel point and shoot / bike jersey pocket camera.

Despite our snack of good soda and potato chips, having just biked for 2:20 and swam for 45 minutes we were getting a bit hungry, so the next stop was Union Woodshop in Clarkston, MI. This offshoot of Clarkston Union, one of my favorite America food restaurants, has a menu of great looking BBQ dishes and is some place I’d been wanting to try for a while.

With $0.87 glasses (mason jars, really) of Badass Beer (yes, the Kid Rock stuff, a passable lager) on special during the final game of the World Cup (which Spain won) we each ordered pulled pork with a variety of side items. I chose mac and cheese (ala Clarkston Union) and sweet potatoes (with roasted jalapeno and a hint of maple), which can be seen here along with some corn bread and sweet butter. Typcial of most midwestern restaurants portions were large enough to ensure leftovers. I’ll definitely want to go back there, but the typical 1.5 hour wait on most weeknights may make this difficult. I guess we’ll just have to plan for mid-afternoon on a Sunday again.

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Mountain Bike Trails at River Bends

Published June 27, 2010

Those of you who regularly read what I write and pay attention to biking stuff will know that I will frequently ride at Shelby Township’s River Bends Park, located a scant four miles from my house. In the past few months the MMBA, with me providing representation for this project, has been working with Shelby Township to develop new multi-use single track trails in the park. While the MMBA is a mountain biking organization, the trails we build are perfect for biking, hiking, trail running, and numerous other activities, so we’re an ideal organization to build new trails in a park.

Yesterday we had our first full trail day at River Bends, an event which brought out 15-ish people to help finish off Phase 1 of the trail. A few of us had started work prior to the Trail Day, but yesterday did the bulk of the work. We now have just over a mile of new single track winding its way along a ridge between some existing two-track and the Clinton River floodplane. If you’d like to see a KMZ of the route that we completed yesterday it can be found here.

Now, time to polish up any little quirks in the current trail and move on to thinking about Phase Two.

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Baby Robin No More

Published June 3, 2010

The baby robin that Danielle was raising has flown away. On Memorial Day she took it home and right after being taken outside it flew up into a nearby cherry tree and stayed there. The photo above is one of the last photos I took of it, with it standing on my kitchen counter after slowly trying to eat a piece of nightcrawler. It kept making noise and trying to pick it up before Danielle fed it directly to the robin.

New photos of the rescued baby robin, all taken the day before it flew away, can be found at the bottom of this page and on this page.

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Ant Hill at Bald Mountain

Published May 31, 2010

Bald Mountain State Recreation Area, North Unit has some slightly less morose things to see too, such as quite-large ant hills like as the one above. These are a common site along the mountain bike / hiking trail, often found in slightly sunny sandy areas. Today I took a fast turn a little wrong and almost ended up hitting one, which would have been in no way good. (They are super-soft, likely to cause a crash, and filled with likely-to-be-angry ants.) Thankfully I avoided it and did not fall, continuing on my way.

This one here is found on the east side of connector from the orange loop to Predmore Road, between numbers 16 and 17. (Map) This connector is commonly used to avoid the low laying and frequently wet trail between the old ranger’s house and the lake. As the trail was mostly dry I rode that segment, but used this section to get back to Predmore and thus back to Addison Oaks where I had parked for today’s bike ride.

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