Category: outdoors

This afternoon an updated copy of my previous map of Oakland County’s Addison Oaks park’s Mountain Bike Route went live on DestinationOakland.com, Oakland County’s portal-ish website for “…all there is to see and do in Oakland County…”.

With some spare winter evenings and a few days off work around Christmas I was able to get the first version completed, and then after working with some great folks at OCPR this new version was developed. Beyond some readability and Point of Interest enhancements it now bears a DestinationOakland.com logo, my Trail Courtesy logo, and can be folded into quarters (for distribution in a map box) and still have all title and all logos visible.

I’m really happy with how it came out, and I’m particularly glad that Addison Oaks now has a usable map of the mountain bike route. It’ll be good for new people to find their way around, trail day work, and trail development proposals.

If you’d like to download a copy for yourself, it is available from either of these three locations: Addison Oaks Park Maps · Oakland County Park Maps · MMBA Trail Guide.

 

In mountain biking literature it’s common to find graphics which replicate a yield sign and indicate that, as a courtesy while riding trails, cyclists should yield to both hikers and equestrians. I recently found myself needing one of these graphics for a map that I’m working on, and while it’s easy to find small raster (PNG, GIF, etc) versions online I was unable to easily locate a vector copy, much less one that had a license allowing free reuse. So, I made one myself and it’s available as public domain for anyone to reuse.

This graphic, as seen above, can be downloaded from here in EPS format: mtb_trail_courtesy_yield_sign_v1.eps

In making this logo I used cyclist, hiker, and equestrian graphics provided by the National Park Service as part of their Map Symbols for NPS Maps. Being released in October 2011 these are as up to date as possible. Curiously, these symbols have just one symbol for “Bicycle Path” which seems to combine all cycling routes under one symbol.

I believe this artwork (mtb_trail_courtesy_yield_sign_v1.eps, MD5 checksum 4aac401c347b80675a673e756a604480) to be free of known copyright restrictions and I am thereby releasing it into the public domain. If this artwork is reused elsewhere a citation (to Steve Vigneau / nuxx.net) would be appreciated, but it is not necessary.

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.