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

GPS route profile of new single track

Having downloaded the data from the GPS,time to have a look at it.

First stop Google Earth, very cool illustration and gives a good feel for the trackFor something a bit more informative though i exported the data to a *.GPX file and put the data into GPS Visualizer .

With a little fiddling you can set the program to colour code the slopes of your track, and from that you can trouble shoot the spots where the grade is too steep to be sustainable. Particularly keeping in mind IMBA's 10% average grade guideline. Most of the track looks good- though I may change the bottom of the track just a little bit.

Corridor flagging and planning

My first day of proper work out at the course. Got stuck into marking out 1km of corridor for the main new section of single track, I'll put up a GPS map once I have it finished.

I also started working on some re-alignments for a fence line track, as you can see in the photo below the track runs a little bit close to the fence for comfort. So the track will be moved to the left where the pink tape is. This should be pretty easy work as it doesn't require any benching


Also took a picture of the track along the lake, very little work to be done here- just a couple of passing lanes

And a final pic of a great construction tool, though it may be a bit wide for single track

Cumulative time working on track: 12hrs

It Begins

Ok here's the deal.
I've been given the go-ahead to start building a 24hr MTB course, and thought it would be good to share the experience so others can learn from my mistakes (and hopefully successes).

I have had quite a bit of experience building tracks with the Gap Creek Trails Alliance and some building on private property, but this will be my first 24hr course. Luckily for me, the property already has a lot of fantastic single track, and the event manager has put a lot of thought into the layout he wants. All I gotta do is get the existing tracks ready to handle 24hrs of punishment, design the new links and organise their building-simple huh.

The specifics of the build:

• ~17km long looping track
• about 75% single track
• low undulating country with some flowing horse made single track to use.
• about 1.5km of single track to be built.

The location is a private property in Queensland Australia, I'm not giving any more details as to its location because if we end up with people trespassing before the race, the owner will pull the race approval. I'm sure some of you will be smart enough to figure out where the course is, but I hope your also smart enough to not ruin it for us all.

Cumulative time working on track: 5hrs