There’s a myth around built trails. It goes like this: No Dig, No Ride. Forged on sun kissed dirt where sculpted jumps and perfect landings black-holed a tribe of riders steeped in a culture matching individual need to shared endeavour.
Good stuff. Right on, even. But it’s not an axiom that holds for trails cut into contested woodland. Barely a proxy for any vague feelings of guilt that you may be riding on the shoulders of giants.
I should know. I do this all the time. The trail network in the Forest of Dean is maybe 20% sanctioned trails with 80% sinewy singletrack carving fuck-you signatures into Forestry Commission machine tooled straight edges, and private land where it’s fine to shoot fat birds for the few, but off limits for anyone with a progressive view of the trespass law.
That’s as far as I’m going with the legality of built trails. There are solid arguments on both sides. Rarely meeting in the middle. It is, at best, firing arrows at the heart of the periphery and none of us have a winning dart. So swerving the finger pointing of those to whom shared access for the many continues to be an anathema, let’s instead talk trail maintenance.
Not the building of new trails. We leave that to the masters of the dirt. The Bermateers, the sandstone sculptures, those with the skilled eyes for the perfect apex, the completers of ideas, the Gods of the shovel. You know who you are. Mostly called Gary where we ride 🙂
Every visionary needs an army of grunts. A grunt of the unseen. An appropriate collective noun to encompass Matt. Haydn and I as we forsake our normal transportation- swapping pedals for stout boots and awesome bikes, for tooling previously employed in the pointless pursuit of manicured flower beds.
Sporting these icons of the middle aged, three middle aged blokes set about restoring the main climb to something rideable. Autumn annually deposits sufficient leaf mulch to turn 30 seconds of effort into a wheel spinning, pedal steamer, max heart rate frustration of failure.
Unless you’re on an eBike in which case would you mind turning Turbo right fucking off right now? Again, a topic for another day possibly when I’m significantly more mediated.
Moving on, Matt moved to clearing the top of the gulley festooned with three months of rain and misery. Under which is some solid bedrock a few hours from seeing the light. We’re not so much putting things back, more taking stuff out. Mostly punting it up and over shoulder height. This is not crafting new trails, it’s is not the work of the trail auteur, master of all they survey.
Nope, while their efforts have been magnificent in creating a trail network calling to those firstly with ‘something of the night about them‘ and latterly to groups hailing from hundred of miles away* They don’t come for this climb but they will lap it multiple times to access the best trails.
Putting the Matt into Mattock. Matt scrapes down to the Bedrock while H and I drag mulch from lower down attempting to turn a fetid rut into a two bike wide trail. There’s so much more we want to do, we see the need to bench cut the start of the climb and go full rake on the upper sections, but there’s both a physical and mental limit to poke entropy with a rake.
So we focus on priorities. This is filthy, if we left it be unridable until about April at which point it’d be a narrow single sun baked line sandwiched between desiccated leaves and encroaching borders. So we punt everything dead over the bank then rake the remains into the trail, to be corralled, collected and carted off to a final destination building on the day of the dead of previous years.
This is where you end up, Mostly leaning on knackered gardening equipment, surveying the fruits of our efforts while mumbling “That’ll do pig” before retiring to a pint of Creme de Menthe and an emergency physio appointment. Four hours is around twelve hours too little to fully clean this climb. And that’s before we consider the priority of clearing the landing of a gap jump best considered as a shortcut to Accident and Emergency.
Not today tho. We weary trail warriors hoist tools shoulder high and head back to civilisation***. We have most definitely given something back and taken something out. Three days later we’re back in the dark, powerful lights illuminating the now perfect climb sirening winter mountain bikers to their doom. Or the pub. Which is often the same thing.
It always feels good doing this stuff. Not the next day when any movement requires a good deal of thought, and possibly a manual. But every time this winter we head up this climb, there’s just that little damp spark igniting a sense of community. Doing the right thing thing even if no-one notices.
On that, as we wearily headed to Matt’s van, a belligerent rambler demanded to know what we’d been up to. He’d clearly pre-loaded vitriol targeting those tyred of tradition, and middle fingered to authority. Strangely when we explained all our our previous four hours were cleaning the footpath***, he lost a whole lot of rigjhtousness.
Because I’m an idiot, I came VERY close to adding we’d built an amazing jump configured to skewer innocent dog walkers. I restrained myself tho because shared trails are pretty much the definition of Rule 1: Don’t be a dick. Very much a proponent of that.
Have rake. Will dig.
*on the day we were on the shovel, a cheery bunch of double digit Welsh eBikers transited our best work. I did my best to reciprocate. Not my best efforts to be honest.
**As close to Ross gets anyway.
***Yes, I am fully aware of the irony. Don’t blame me, it’s a bloody stupid land access law.