Peacocks and Chinchillas

When: February 17 – 20 Where: Fort Yargo State Park, Winder, Georgia Who: Yargo Area Biking Association (YABA), Georgia State Parks What: Designed and built a reroute of a 700-foot fall-line section of trail that was becoming significantly rutted, through a pine forest with typical Georgia red clay. The new section maintains the climb but along a longer, 1000-foot section. Color Commentary: Our IMBA blog post for that weekend tells the story of the Gordon brothers, without whom the trails there would not exist. I loved riding there, since my favorite kind of riding is a 10-15 mile loop in different kinds of ecosystems, that takes advantages of views, access to water, and topography. For the building, we were joined by a group of 20 people sentenced to community service, which was interesting, to say the very least.

If the title didn’t indicate it, we have officially hit the road for another year of teaching the art and beauty of sustainable trail building. We have one year and a half left as Trail Care Crew. This year we’ll work mostly in the East and the Midwest. Our visit schedule is posted, at least through March, on the IMBA website: http://www.imba.com/tcc/schedule. If you are in our neck of the woods (or, if we are in yours, I suppose), let us know! In the meantime, I never blogged about how wonderful our last visit of 2010 was in San Diego. The weather felt like vacation weather (i.e. warm and tropical), we built an amazing section of trail, and we were busy all weekend with some pretty hard-working and fun-to-be-with advocates. Here’s a slideshow of our work and times in San Diego (mid-December).

This is a picture of a heavily eroded section of trail. It’s a multi-use trail at Granite Bay State Park, outside of Sacramento, Calif. This used to be a smooth singletrack trail. However, it wasn’t built purposefully. Instead of minding sustainability guidelines, the trail was built on a fall line and water streamed down the hillside on the trail itself. As it did that, it picked up both velocity and sediment (in this case, sand and decomposed granite). As a result, the trail became a gully. Trail users moved the trail over to the right hand side, and the same problem is happening. No amount of diversion or reroute will fix this trail. The only solution is to prevent people from using this trail, establish a sustainable reroute, and attempt to revegetate the unsustainable trail sections. All of the sediment that is being eroded is draining into the Granite Bay

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It’s November. Our first year of Trail Care is folding itself neatly into the books. The year is certainly not wearing on us, but we’re looking forward to a break. We have five more Trail Care Crew visits this year, all in California: Grass Valley, Coloma, Santa Rosa, San Francisco, San Diego. All nice places. Next year on the road is shaping up to be a good one, there’s interest for capacity building around trails and mountain biking across the United States, which is certainly something to look forward to. There comes a lot of excitement with going new places. But I feel like I’ve done California. More than a few times, actually. That said, we go new places and meet new people every day, so I can’t complain. I guess I’m slowly retreating into winter hibernation mode where the same old questions seem a bit old, and I’m looking

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