new trails

So I missed the Sunday Michaux ride from Jake's today, and missed a good chance to go x-c skiing too. Instead, I joined 7 other guys from State College and Huntingdon, and walked around the woods of Raystown Lake staring at a GPS receiver, trying to walk a line which had been loaded into it. This line is to be part of 30 miles of new singletrack mountain bike trails being planned for Raystown Lake by IMBA and the Corps of Engineers. The trail's designer, Clark, had digitized this line in his GIS software, and downloaded it onto several GPS receivers that we would use to follow it on the ground, measuring with a clinometer, and flagging the corridor along the way. Sometime in the future, the IMBA crew will come in with their magic trail building machines, and transform our flags into sweet singletrack, or bloggable flow trails as some would call them.

It was a cool learning experience, and another nice hybrid of my avocation and vocation. Not quite as much fun as riding or skiing, but nonetheless....

After the work, Darius and I took a short ride on some of the trails they built last summer, and messed around a bit on this section.

Now I'm off to Virginia for a couple days to work the predicted big snow event of 2007. Hope we get some of that around here so I can take a day off and get some local x-c skiing in when I get back.