syncro's trail blog

instead of jumping off the roller and landing into the berm try rolling it with speed. by jumping into the berm/wall you scrub a lot of speed on the compression of the landing. roll it smooth all the way thru and you actually accelerate b/c the radius decreases slightly.

not sure what you mean, are you talking about the circled area in the pic? that's not going to change at all if that's what you mean.

Finally got around to having a few go's on this at the weekend. I echo a few of the points Dan mentions but IMO none of the stuff with the walls, the little upslope between them etc, would matter if you could hit it faster. I'm no Jared Graves but I was sucking the roller into the first wall as much as possible but I'm still kind of floating over it and compressing the bike pretty hard just as I'm trying to turn into it. Before the roller was there I used to be able to go higher up the first wall and was still hauling out the end of it but I don't think I can anymore.

The thing is an absolute work of art but I think you possibly need to tweak the roller into it Mark. Either pull back the upslope (at least a bike length IMO) making it longer so you can make the downslope (not sure about the distance to the berm infront of it?) or just reduce the height of the roller?

Be happy to help if you do make any changes. Oh and if others are pinning it no problem ignore this crap :)

Synchro,

I deffinitely think most of this should be dismanteled and used to accent my bar and office space.

I'll even help you with it.

Mark,

Hit this up for the first 2x this weekend. Didn't need a lot of speed, and nailed it all the way thru the second time. Great job! Heck, even the wife managed to hit it on her first go-round.

Thanks for your hard work on this. Let me know if you want/need help with any other features on this wicked fun trail.

PS -[HTML_REMOVED] Not sure if you fixed it, or someone just decided to open it, but the teeter was open and someone had taken the tire and moved it from underneath..

took some pics of some work i did yesterday. over the winter i did a few minor things too, mainly cleaning up the bypass around the wall and clearing drains, etc but no pics.

the exit to the power lines had some issues as the end of the ladder put you between a small stump on the left and a large root on the right. because of this the alignment with the ladder and the trail was skewed and it didn't flow well. you can see from the lack of bark on the root that riders had been tagging it in their effort to squeeze their was through. i reworked the exit by digging out the stump and a big buried log to open things up. this allowed the down ramp off the ladder to be better aligned with the corner and a slight berm was put in as well. the sight line is now much improved and the section rides better.

once out onto the power lines there was another small ladder that had been used to get over a difficult section as well. as the alignment was not perfect, over time riders were cheating to the left of the ladder and a braid had developed. while this line flowed better with the corner before it made the transition to the next corner more difficult. in this situation the ladder was removed altogether (and saved for use somewhere else), the buried log was dug out and the area infilled with gold from the braid area.

Nice work Mark.

Looks good, thanks for digging.

took some pics of some work i did yesterday.

wtf? You do trail work? I thought you just bitched on the internet. :)

Good to see you found some time to get out and dig. Nice work.

wtf? You do trail work? I thought you just bitched on the internet. :)

Good to see you found some time to get out and dig. Nice work.

ha!

i woke up sunday morning wanting to get back up there instead of going to work.

Great work on that Salvation trail of yours … thanks.

Looks like good work, Mark.

Just a question if you don't mind - in the second set of pictures, why did youwork on the brush/undergrowth, the plants on the left-hand side of the corner? I can see a slight re-route, still….just curious.

Looks like good work, Mark.

Just a question if you don't mind - in the second set of pictures, why did youwork on the brush/undergrowth, the plants on the left-hand side of the corner? I can see a slight re-route, still….just curious.

the pic is a bit deceptive. i didn't work on the brush on the left side of the trail at all, all that black soil was dug out from underneath the ladder and piled up there to close off the braid to the left of the ladder. then the area under the ladder was filled in with rocks and gold. it was done for trail alignment. the issue with going wide to the left side of the trail is that it jams the rider up for the next corner. so by bringing the riders back to the centre of the original line they're in a much better position for the next corner.

edit
one of the things that needs to be considered with trail alignment is the visual aspect of the surrounding environment. sometimes you can get the perfect alignment but riders will still braid or cut corners because a visual element will draw there eye to a certain point. the rider goes where they look and that may not always be to the right spot. so by filling in the left side of that section and opening up the right side it pulls the rider's eye back to the centre of the trail. the other thing that helped was the removal of the ladder as coming into the corner it was a bit blind so when riders got there and weren't lined up properly the quick decision was to go to the left of the ladder and through that short shrubbery (salal) until it was ridden out of existence. once that line was established and it was where the rider's eye naturally went, that's where every rider would go.

i've done that myself on trails i know well even. you're just bombing along and your eye follows a certain line and next thing you know you're telling yourself aww crap, i'm on the braid.

Thanks.

so here's a little synopsis of the new work i've done on the wall over the last little while.

the first step was to put in the proper entrance. the one that was in place was temporary and while the kicker was smooth the landing was a bit rough.

kicker

landing

all the rockwork on the landing was removed to be used elsewhere and the area was leveled using gold dirt. large posts were put in place to act as a base for the new entrance ramp.

posts

lining things up

once the position was determined i started to build the tabletop for the entrance. i thought about making it a gap but decided to keep it a bit more user friendly instead by going with the tabletop. once the table top part was set up i started building the new down ramp into the wall.

tabletop

down ramp

down ramp

after splitting a ton of rungs the new entrance was decked out.

new entrance

view from the top

North Shore love! Stunning pics of proper engineering of wooden structures. Thanks :)