PT v. 2.0

My new ride

new things to ride

When that last heavy chunk of clay rolled off the tri-axle dump on Wednesday, I hit the panic button. How is this huge load of heavy-ass dirt gonna get moved and spread and shaped into fun ridable jumpy things? By Saturday? I start calling friends with skid-loaders and asked questions like, "So, um, hows it going? Do you happen to have a Bobcat and a skilled driver available?.. like this afternoon, ...and willing to do it for free......?" Those calls proved pretty unfruitful, so I rented a skid-steer for a few hours to move one pile into smaller, better located piles.

Superhero Jessee arrives on scene with skid skillz, tape measure, flags, paint and gets to work laying it out. He's not sure about my S-turn idea, but we go ahead and dump several buckets and a few hours on it while the clock and daylight tick away. We finish it and try to ride it, and it wasn't happening at all. Triple-check the Pump Track Nation diagram, shake our heads and do a little more shaving and tweaking. A few more test rides by us and some kids that showed up, and we're doing more damage to the S every time we try to ride it. The entrance to the S is real tricky, and it now affects the original non-S line as well. We give up on the S for a while and start moving dirt for the new rollers.

the Man

The rollers went in pretty easily, helped along by 3 locals who stopped by and helped at various times during the 3 days. The original gaps were looking a little big and the first test rides showed that. We softened the landings, knowing that everyone was gonna come up short for a while. Jessee built a drop-in that helped get some speed, which then proved to be a little unnecessary by Saturday. By Saturday the S had miraculously turned ridable too.

cool to have the PA Mountain Bike Club leaders here to burn in the new lines. It's like we have a brand new pump track now. Thanks to everyone.

Ben set up a cool trials demo for the club leaders to watch and brought a couple spare trials bikes to try. Most of it was far tough for us gutless xc riders.