Trail to the Treasure. This episode is about trails, what makes a good one, what makes a bad one, how to ruin a good one, how to use what’s there better without ruining it. This one comes to us from Ken Barker, who is a trail builder. He actually sent this to us as a topic suggestion a long time ago, but we’re bad at follow up, so…we’re just getting to it.
Music pick of the week
Robot – Workin’ Man Noise Unit – Play Loud
Stevil – Big Ups – Two Parts Together
Podcast (revolting): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:52 — 53.9MB)
The Atlanta metro is home to a huge mountain bike community. The very first and among the largest IMBA subsidiary groups SORBA (Southern Off Road Bicycle Association) was founded here. They have made tremendous inroads with trail building with regional and state parks and tons of work to gain access within Forrest Service lands and Army Corp of Engineers property. I’ve ridden down here since the late 90’s and the growth has been explosive. As such, the drive has been to add more trails to authorized parks in rapid succession. Mechanized trail building (Dingos/Backhoes) is the fastest way requiring less time and volunteers. These trails tend to appeal to the newest and new school riders seeking flow trails. I first saw these begin to arrive in the early 00’s and while I don’t mind riding some of them, I generally find them boring.
Fortunately there are many old school hand built options and amusingly there are continued complaints about those places being too rough on social media. There are even groups of riders that simply won’t be found on these trails. In particular, my home base trails, Big Creek Park in Roswell, Georgia has possibly the gnarliest tread of any of the riding locales and is the only place around with sanctioned legit DH runs that are short, but spicy. No shuttles, but there are marked one way return trails. Beyond the DH/Freeride stuff which BTW is mostly using natural terrain features, there are what they refer to as XC trails, but again these are more hectic than most other places “XC” trails and include nonstop bonus lines. It is these trails that are my favs and there is a certain crew that designs and sculpts them. This same group also has constructed a network of bonkers “pirate” trails along highway easements, behind shopping malls, extending off power line cuts and tons of other places. I can leave from my house and hit miles of these underground trails with very few miles on any road. Additionally, it is rare to ever see anyone on them as you kinda need to know someone and have the secret handshake to get the goods. I guess this kind of thing is my favorite as you feel like you are getting away with something riding them even though most of it is on property that cannot be sold/developed/or turned into any kind of park. Holla if yr ever down south.