After more than a week of rain, we’ve had our first 70° day of 2014 today. We’ve been dodging rainstorms and riding the road bikes around and we’ve managed to sneak a couple trail rides in when the rain subsides for a few days, but today was the first day when it was really dry enough to go have a look at the local trails. There has been some trail work done on what are hopefully the last days of the rainy season so today we got a chance to actually put down the shovels and go for a ride.
It’s always great to be out on the trails after a long winter of being cooped up indoors. It was a really nice day today, the springtime sun shining through the trees still barren of any leaves
The first long ride of the spring is a sad reminder of how far out of shape you get over the winter playing video games and drinking beer, time to start putting in the miles and getting in shape!
Unfortunately, there was one major bummer on this nice spring day; the amount of damage done to the trails by people riding when the trails are too muddy to ride. There were a number of trail sections that had serious damage and some sections of singletrack are now “triple track”; trails that are ten feet wide because people have ridden “around” a muddy section. Each rider goes a little wider than the last person, before you know it, you have a ten foot wide mud hole.
You spend an entire Friday doing trail work in the rain, when you come back on Monday, the trail is completely destroyed because the “weekend warriors” don’t have enough respect for the trail to not damage it. You get to the point where it’s just not worth it to maintain the trail. We’ve been heading out into the woods and working on other trails, this time, we aren’t going to tell anybody about them.