Dreary weather over night that carried over into the morning. Today I drive down from Santiam to Alsea over to the coast. Successful drive down the mtn, brakes still work & driving the same way.
I arrived @ closed library meeting place in plenty of time. Towards the meeting time and I am the only rig in the lot. I was starting to fish for the meeting data when Jesse and Lori pulled up in their IMBA TCC car. Greetings. Jesse checked my web site several days b4 and commented it seemed we were riding the same places just separated by days. He struck out also on Buckhorn and Henry Coe.
Friday’s presentation was to land managers. This project is on BLM land. A bunch of BLM folks including a ranking person who manages this rec project. BLM will build a core trail for multi use. Extending from this loop will be refined user groups: Horses no bikes, bikes no horses, hikers open to all. It will be up to the user group to obtain the funds to build their piece. BLM has 2013 $ and is funding trails. The local newly formed IMBA chapter sponsored the event.
Afterwards I drove up to Mary’s Peak up high in the coastal range. I walked to the top in the fog then above it right @ peak at 4097′ high. I camped in the FS wet XG for $5. Some rain fell.
Sat I drove down to Alpine for the TCC session. The morning was instruction on sustainable trails. Afterwards we car pooled out to Alsea Falls where we were going to apply our learned skills to reconstruct a piece of trail. Deep wet forest cover, lots of vegetation on the ground supplied by lots of roots under ground.
Visible is brown dirt of new tread carved out of the green. Jesse organized us into 2 teams and created team leaders and job functions. Your function determined what tool you used. I chose to protect my body by being the final operation of packing and gardening. This vegetation was thicker than what I dug fire line in back in ’70 when I was on a fire fighting crew.
Helping was Shane from IMBA Trail Solutions. I shared rides out and back w/ him. Jesse and Lori were staying w/ club members back in Corvallis. Shane lives in HR. All 4 of us drove back to Corvallis for dinner. I left b4 too dark to drive back to Alsea TH for the night.
Today a group ride met @ 10:00 lead by Mike who I remembered from the Cream Puff 2 years ago. He is a race promoter also but he provided the timing @ the Puff. He is local. He stated several times in good faith that getting these trails built will be great for him as they are almost in his back yard.
Our group:
Park of our ride took us over what we constructed the day b4. Pleasant. Trails here are deep woods old hand built riding on hemlock needles and roots. Dense and dark.
Jason from the group invited a bunch of us to dinner @ his house tonight. He had read about me in the Bike mag article.
My plan is to drive down towards Oakridge tonight then ride there till Thurs AM then meet Jesse for 3 days of riding the North Umpqua River Trail (NUT). Need to return to Bend to pick up my new dropper and a few days of riding there. Then go back west and north to ride Black Rock then on to Sandy Ridge.
Whew. Back to living on the road.
One rider helped build the trail @ Lincoln Parish park in Ruston, LA that I rode. A woman was from WVa and we shared names of places we rode there.