Berm building

After looking at the switchback section with fresh eyes I worked out why it was still riding slow, the berm at the bottom was no where near long enough to hold your speed through the corner.


So after about 2hrs of slogging (Large logs are much harder to cut and move by yourself)- the berm now looks like this:

I've also insloped the corner a fair bit more and put hardwood stakes behind the logs to make them nice and solid. If I get the time I'm going to extend the berm a bit further up the hill, but there are a lot of other jobs with higher priority.

My cumulative time working on track: 45hrs
Total work time for track: 126hrs

First build day

With just over a month to go till the race and things are getting hectic. I had my first build day out on the course over the weekend which had a turnout of 11 people and we got plenty of track built.

The problem with running these days is you don't get a lot of time to take photo's. These ones below are courtesy of Mad Aussie of MTB Dirt


This is one of the berms in the switch back being laid out, and then once built. These have ended up 4.5-5m radius to try and maintain riders speed and minimise braking (and braking ruts). Its still slower than I planned so I'm going to extend the berm uphill to try and hold more speed through them.

The creek crossing (with bridge) is now out, there was just going to be too much work to cut the approachs into the steep side slope. The track has now been re-routed (again) further up the hill to take advantage of the easy build- but hopefully with enough side slope to shed water.

A few of the lessons learnt from the day:

• Your planning and flagging won't be right, be prepared to tweak alignments
  
• Build your switchbacks BIG if you want to maintain speed
• Take advantage of volunteers expertise
  
• Don't over-extend your workers, big bench cuts demoralise the crew quickly
  

With the race being so soon, there isn't going to be time for the tracks to ridden in, so this means extra earthwork to build them ready to ride. Its one of my pet hates to turn up to races to find the tracks half done, so I'll be spending a lot of time out at the course making them as pefect as possible.

My cumulative time working on track: 36hrs
Total work time for track: 126hrs

Rain

Over the weekend, there has finally been some rain here. Though I haven't been out to the course yet to get a proper look, any soil moisture is going to help with the building this weekend. I was starting to consider using water from the lake to help bind the soils during construction, particularly the two berms we will be building.

The rain also reminded me that I hadn't done the wet weather plan yet. Overall the course is fairly well weather proof so the race would still go on but there are a few sections that would quickly turn nasty with some heavy rain and a lot of riders. I have now worked out a plan that reverses the new single track that is being built (Another good reason to build tracks rideable both ways), and keeps laps at about 11km. Hopefully it won't be needed but it will reduce the stress levels significantly in the week before the race

Cumulative time working on track: 21hrs

More corridor flagging

Just spent the day out going over the course with the event organisers and working on the corridor alignments for the first of the build days (in less than two weeks).

The inital concerns of looking at the angle of a couple of the tracks on GPS were confirmed when I got back out to the site, so I'm:

• Removing a uphill switchback towards the end of the new section of trail in the pictures below, it was just not going to work.
• One of the tracks finished up a gully with a 25% incline, which wouldn't have lasted the race let alone be considered sustainable building- this will now drop earlier to the valley (through a sweet descending switchback) and then climb more gradually up.
• Hopefully going to put a bridge in across a gully which will give some great atmosphere to that part of the course, and avoid a nasty gully causeway.

The rest of the time out there was spent listing the area's that need work (ready to get final approval from the land manager), prioritising the construction, and making a plan of action for the first build day.


I'll try and get a course map and some more photo's up shortly.

Cumulative time working on track: 18hrs