Sunday, November 06, 2011

New Trail!

Oh yeah.....New Trail! Then I remember.......uggh! New trail. You know how it goes here in the Mid-West, at any rate. New trail is always welcome, for the most part, by off road cyclists. However; it also means that you will have that not-so-nice new trail feeling after your ride!

Flags, bumps, and a thin, scratched out line.
I shoulda rode the Snow Dog! Well, at least it was challenging, that much is true. The new single track is on the South Side of Camp Ingawanis. It is going to be a very nice addition when it gets worked into the land. Right now it has the dichotomy of being fluffy and bumpy. The dirt, having had nothing on it but decaying plant residue for who knows how long, is all fluffy, but that doesn't mean your ride over it is.

In fact, the fluff allows you to find unseen roots, and holes and harder dirt. All conspire to make forward progress really tough in places. So, it is tougher than it looks now, but it will get burned in, and we'll have some nice, twisty, up and down single track to add into the already very nice loop out there.

Saturday was my first ride on most of  it. I may get out again today, but I have an appointment for some special Father/Son time which I really need to participate in.  Maybe I should drag him out to the Camp to scope out the deer that were frolicking around in there today while I rode. I bet he'd get a kick out of that.

But however that goes, I hope you all are having a great weekend!

4 comments:

S.Fuller said...

I ran into some of that yesterday as well, but thankfully I was on the Mukluk That Has No Name. It was still a bit rough, but any new trail is always good. :)

This was interesting in that it's a fairly tight, twisty section off of what is pretty much a big ring only run we have along the river north of Des Moines. Definitely a change in pace. Almost leaves me to wonder if I don't need a slightly narrower set of bars for summertime fatbike riding. Have you trimmed your bars down at all?

Guitar Ted said...

@S.Fuller: I haven't trimmed any bars for single track here. I do bang the ends of some of my wider bars on trees once in a while, but otherwise, it hasn't been an issue to run wider bars on tight single track for me.

Captain Bob said...

Glad you made it out there Ted....to be technical, the trails are "re-opened existing trail." It's been over 6 years since that stretch of trail was used and it has been missed. It's better now than before and is designed well by our trailboss to ensure that it is a sustainable system. It is .62 miles in length. Durring our time trial yesterday the average time was about 7-10 miinutes longer than before so it really helps make it a better loop.

Guitar Ted said...

@Captain Bob: Well, you can name it what you want, all I know is that those "new" trails were about as "fluffy" as it gets. I've built trails from scratch and that's often what you'll find when you go over new ground. Nature claims her own rather quickly if ever there were trails there before, that's all I'll say. ;>)