Corkscrew Trailday

A sunny trail day! I've only been doing this for a couple of years, but I've never been to a trail day where it didn't rain at least a bit. I showed up in the parking lot at the school a bit early, expecting I'd be the first. However Simon and Natalia beat me there. Neither of those two have a car, but were so committed that they got up at 6AM to grab a bus from Surrey to come help out. That is some serious dedication! In fact, with the North Shore Ripper party the night before, I heard a couple of stories of people not making it to BED much before 6AM. Nice work on Simon, Natalia, and anyone who woke up hung over (ripperized) and still came out! The signup sheet showed just over 50 and I'm pretty sure that there was another 10 or so that didn't sign the sheet.

Dan from "On Top" bike shop arrived with the shuttle rig and between him and a bunch of other trucks everyone got shuttled to the top of the trail more or less on time. Lester, as usual, had his truck full of NSMBA tools. People grabbed a tool and pail and went hard at it.

"Lower Oilcan" (LOC) is an old school trail that's fallen into serious disrepair over the last few years. No one seems to ride it anymore, although several people still use it as an up track. Most rooty sections are horribly eroded, the structures are unsound, there are deep puddles, and some decidedly un-flowy lines. The vision is to make LOC an intermediate trail which could take some pressure off of "Pipeline" which is pretty much the only mid-mountain blue run and sees a huge amount of traffic. There are 3 trail days planned for LOC which should put it into a ridable state and ready for someone to adopt.

All 3 of the wooden stunts are completely decrepit and unridable. When we did a recon hike a couple of weeks ago, Mark pretty much knocked over one of the elevated ladders by leaning on it. I'm sure that a few years ago all of these structures were sound, but with no maintenance, the forest has pretty much reclaimed them.

A challenge for many trails that start from the access road is the entrance itself. Every so often the road crews from Grouse Mountain grade the road or dig out the ditches and the debris often ends up dumped on the downhill slope. The entrance to Oilcan had recently become an eroded trench that was a very effective funnel for dumping more water onto the trail. We moved the entrance 20 meters lower down the road and relined it to have a much more gradual line down the slope. The old entrance was then decommissioned.

Check out the cute fence at the top to keep people from cutting a steeper line onto the entrance. Its worth a ride up for the fence feature alone!

The root that's obvious in the "before" shot belongs to a big and very healthy fir tree. You can see the chain ring gouges in it, though. Some large rocks were used to build up the downside of the root which will stop further erosion, protect the root, make the trail flow better and generally please the gods. The trail had gotten pretty wide here from riders seeking out a less gnarly drop, so this crew narrowed it by stacking up some debris.

Before

This is a great example of why Oilcan never got ridden anymore. These off camber, eroded roots have death written all over them and even without the traffic have been increasingly exposed.

Protecting the roots of this big, old tree was a key consideration in fixing up this drop.

During

This is a "ripperized" Sven giving his head a break from pounding spikes into the cribbing. The dead tree was used as a brace for the side of the crib. They grabbed some cedar splits to use as center braces and wailed in some huge spikes to hold it all together.

Although she looks fresh and cheerful, Dorothy was pretty "ripperized" as well.

After

This is the final product. Rock armoring filled the cribbing. We carried the rockwork up above the ramp make sure the hemlock's roots were protected, and below to make sure that a swamp didn't develop below this awesome piece of work.

Its not even recognizable from its previous condition!

The rickety old ladder that you see here was the one that fell apart when we walked by. The low area where the bridge is broken was getting pretty swampy. With the bridge decommissioned there was no need to subject riders to the swamp so a reline was in order.

We left some of the decommissioned old stunts for historical value, and some because the effort was better spent working on the actual trail. Someone can always go back later to clean it up. One, however, we did take away. The trail needed to be relined around it and the stunt had gotten so ghetto it was an eyesore.

I remember looking at this section on the pre-hike, thinking "Yikes!". Mark and Deiter have the vision, though and decided to reline this section to just the other side of the live trees in the pictures. The crew for this section recycled most of the previous rockwork and brought in many other huge stones to build a solid new line. The old line was thoroughly decommissioned to the point of not even being able to tell it used to be a trail. Curiously, after talking to Cliff, who started riding the shore ages ago, it seems as though the new line was the original!

On every trail day I've been to some crew built a berm. This day was no different. Simon, Natalia, and a few other eager folks were told to make this section flow. There's no before shots, but as you can see from this pic, it'll DEFINATELY flow!!! Its in a perfect spot, too. The trail right above it is a pretty steep armored section. Riders will be able to let the bikes run from the top of the roll and rail the berm into the next section.

This section right after the A-frame was super rooty. The bit of trail right below this tended to hold water as well. These guys (Sorry, I didn't get everyone's names) protected the roots with this amazing armoring, and installed a great drainage trench at the bottom.

The lowest section of trail that got worked on was a a reline. The forest in this section has a deep duff floor. Any attempt to put a trail in here, without armoring the ground would result in a rooty, eroded mess within a year. Using some splits from a blown down cedar this cribbed, snakey, semi-ladder structure was constructed and filled with good sized rocks. I was initially unsure of it, but once I stood on it and jumped around I saw that it was totally solid. Nice innovative techniques on this bad boy!!

Dan from On Top bike shop did a great job of shuttling crews up and down the mountain, provided lunch with drinks and goodies, set up the barbeque and lunch zone, and cooked the burgers. During all of that, he took time to talk to everyone, crack jokes, and make people feel welcome. I find it super encouraging that the owner of the shop donates all of that, plus his day off to give back to the community. Thanks for everything, Dan!!

HUGE thanks to everyone who came out! You gave up a sunny day of riding. You got dirty. You probably went home sore, and woke up even more sore the next day. Hopefully you also had fun, met some new riding partners, and learned something from the huge brain trust of the best trail builders in the world. Mostly, though, you have the satisfaction of being able to say, "I'm a part of the solution". Thanks again. See you next trail day!

Before
After		This is the upper part of the reline before it was completed. The hump at the end of the path is the old stump that you see by the side of the trail in the previous pic.