Roger Bikes

Tag: trail building

  • Trail work day – Lost Chicken drainage improvement

    Trail work day – Lost Chicken drainage improvement

    Wow it’s September already! How ya been? My excuses for not posting in a while are all valid and award winning. Basically I got busy and needed to focus on other things. Sorry.

    Our local trails group, Mancos Trails Group, has been busy all summer with multiple trail work days. Today we spent over 5 hours in the pine forest of the Lost Chicken trail. Flags had been set across 2 miles of trail where drainage was an issue.

    Dog break during drainage instruction session

    We continue to have impressive volunteer turnout for these work days. Lots of people and people who are motivated to get shit done. We flagged out more area than we though could be completed and still managed to get everything done. Amazing.

    Managing volunteers is tricky as no one is getting paid. You need to give direction and guidance but then need to keep everything light and fun so they don’t go home.

    It seems this is how all management should be approached but when money is attached we feel the need to change tactics. Money adds incentive and stress which can lead to irrational thoughts and actions. The worst offense being micromanament. That beast with infinite heads and endless annoyance.

    Delegation requires trust and faith. Starting from there we give people an opportunity to succeed or fail. Once one of those happens we can either revise what went wrong or move onto the next stage. Rinse. Iterate. Repeat.

  • Build something big

    As a kid I would imagine wild ideas of being a pilot and astronaut. Dreams were limitless and the sky was not even the limit. Then I went through life and got beat up by the reality that not all dreams can be made into reality. While I hated the idea of limiting my dreams I did need to be practical and make a living.

    All that said, In the last few years Kate and I have been getting back to living the dream. We have done this by being gradual in our approach but always taking a moment to ask the big questions: why are we doing something? and are we thinking big? For our home I covered these questions a few days ago. One thing that is on my mind now is our work with our local trails group.

    Currently our trails group does a great job of maintaining existing trails and recently has been building a decent amount of new trails. One thing I have noticed in my 2 years of volunteering with the group is that the focus is very narrow. This is due to it being an all volunteer group and also being a small town with limited resources.

    Currently there is a lot of groundswell for mountain bike trails in the US. Towns like Bentonville, AR, Fruita, CO, Moab, UT, Asheville, NC, and many others are investing in their trail systems to attract tourism. I think that Mancos has similar potential and that our trails group could play a big part in it.

    Recently a local company, Osprey backpacks, was sold for about $414 million. I think this is a great opportunity for us to put a larger plan together for the group. If we could get just a tiny fraction of that money we could hire someone to run the group full time, have a paid trail crew, and expand our trails system well beyond what we have today.

    I have no idea how to make it all happen other than to start trying. It’s a big dream, but what else are we doing here other than to have big dreams and try to make them real? Stay tuned!

  • Progress : 55/100

    Progress : 55/100

    The fenceline trail is progressing well. I think I will have the southern loop connected back to the road this week. That loop is 0.8 miles long and gives you some great views of the land and area. I am very happy about it and more importantly Kate is happy with the trail.

    Workout details

    I spent 2 hours trail building after work. My arms and back are feeling pretty tired tonight, but we are so close. I might be able to reach to road tomorrow.

    Oh and we tested the solar system out by connecting just 2 of the panels. Everything came on and no smoke arose. I configured the bluetooth apps for the battery monitor and solar charge controller and everything looks good. Progress.

  • Thirty Two : 32/100

    Thirty Two : 32/100

    Today marks the 32nd post in the 100 days of blogging challenge. This also marks the second month of the challenge with today being June 1st. I have written here a few times about the challenge and my approach to it. Mainly I am trying to write something more coherent than what I journal about, but I am also trying to keep it as a hobby type activity. The goal is the activity.

    Staying Active

    One of the most important things I have learned about myself is that I need to be active. Physically and mentally I need a challenge and a goal to shoot for. When I don’t do these things I get moody and generally unpleasant.

    For physical activity I have an Apple watch. The daily rings keep me focused on: moving calorie burn, exercise minutes, and standing for a few minutes each hour. Right now I have hit the Move and Exercise goals everyday since Dec 31st, or 154 days. I had a good streak going with the Stand goal too until last Wednesday. Hitting these goals gives me a few boosts: 1) I have been active all day and 2) I close the little red, blue, and green circles and remember the simple joys of life.

    One of the things that recently got me into hitting all those goals has been the sharing aspect of the watch. Anyone else you know with an Apple watch can share their daily activity with you. You don’t get the GPS of their run or bike, but you do see that they did a type of workout and for how long. You can have notifications let you know when someone has completed a workout or reached a goal. Its like having a workout buddy, but you don’t have to wait for them at the gym.

    The blogging challenge has had a similar effect. When I see someone else’s blog post I am encouraged to write. I also have the camaraderie effect of not wanting to let them down and miss a post. The variety of posts has also helped me think of new things to talk about and ways to express them.

    For a little while I dreaded writing these posts some days. That was when the habit of writing hadn’t formed and I was also overthinking things. The habit has formed out of sheer will power to sit at the computer and write at some point everyday. The overthinking things was overcome when Kate reminded me that I am doing this for fun.

    By being physically active I am helping to calm myself enough to sit and write. The activity also helps me find things to write about. If you do enough things in the day something memorable has to have happened.

    We have 67 more posts to complete the challenge. I still struggle to write these posts because I want to write something interesting, but I also want to go to bed.

    Workout detail

    I hung the last of the drywall this morning before work. Kate took the day off to help her dad and brother start the taping and mud process. After work I grabbed my rake and built a new section of trail. This part connects from the start of Kiss of Cactus. Then it meets up with the lower half of another new trail that is still in development. Then Kate and I went on an after dinner stroll to survey what has been built so far.

  • Trail Building : 26/100

    Trail Building : 26/100

    I grew up mountain biking in the Colorado Rockies and just as the sport was taking off in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I looked up to riders like John Tomac, Ned Overend, Tinker Warez, and others. We would toad trip to Moab, UT for spring break and ride Slick Rock, Poison Spider, and Porcupine Rim. I love riding the dirt.

    When we purchased land a few years ago my first thoughts were to make a system of bike/hike trails. Reality hit me when I realized that trail building is also shallow ditch digging. However, this year is the year that I kick things into gear. I am riding well and the strength routine has my arms ready for digging.

    The first trail is the one that came with the land. Its called fence-line cause it follows our fence-line. The prior owner had walked the perimeter a lot and the trail formed over time. Its not a great biking trail, yet. I need to rake it and in places dig vegetation back a bit.

    The outside line is mostly where fence-line trail exists. Lots of work to be done here.

    Fence-line is fun but I wanted to build something smaller and slower for anyone to ride. It has some challenge to it so you feel accomplishment, but mostly its just for fun. There is a good amount of cactus throughout this area of the land. So we call her: Kiss of Cactus

    It’s a quarter of a mile long, and gains 16ft of elevation.

    Kiss of Cactus is a fun quick rolling spin around the highest point of the land. It was fun to build the first trail small so that it would be ride-able quickly. The next trail will be a little longer and faster. I hope to have it done in a few weeks. However, we are hanging drywall this weekend so there may be a delay.

    • Flag the trail
    • Rake the trail
    • Cut the trail
    • Ride the trail

    Workout detail

    3 sets of 3x10second sprints.

    The Fence-line to Kiss of Cactus is the perfect trail for 10 second all out efforts. There is a small climb on Fence-line to the corner where Kiss of Cactus begins. That is where I do the 10 second sprint and then cool down for 3 minutes by riding back down.

    Happy Tuesday, y’all!