OwenFoster profile

Non-clutched is a winner. A few years ago I set up a Chromag Aperture as a 2x1. Using a Zee short cage/DH mech with no cable to both tension and allow the growth between a 30t and a 36t narrow wide 104 ring (bolted to each other sandwiching the tabs)

The 20t Surly cog out back made for a reasonable, mostly seated climb at 20/30 but with a hand shift at the top I'd have a great charge gear for down or around town at 20-36. 

It was an odd solution but allowed for a very versatile big with the fun of SS. 

Its fun to craft a franken toy.

Big wide flow highways make sense to discuss/sanction given their half life and potential impact. Wee little seasonal single track? Overkill. The list of problems with unauthorized trail building that FLNRO lists is laughably synonymous with all forestry, ATV use, hiking trail development, approach trails to climbing/bouldering, surveying/steak laying. All of it.

Personally all I want is to move some logs out of the way of a natural weave through some bespoke mature forest and maybe rake a bit. The rest is the bastion of rubber and repeat punctuated by touch up maintenance on the most miserable of days for riding. When its proper f'd you can either do the real work of making a sustainable version of it with buckets and effort OR just shut the damn thing.

Sanctioned trails are for aging. Parks and Rec Sites is the department of trails which will get old. Crown land is for all, working to make the woods in your backyard a better place is IMBYism and should encouraged approved with a signature from Victoria or not. I truly wish every wingeing bleeding heart laptop virtue beckon would just go rake a trail or cut drainage the next time they want to bite the hand that feeds and blame builders for a 'problem' that doesn't exist.

Blame it on The GnarSeekers. Its not the fault of the folks visiting town asking Armand or Al the best trails after Rupert and The GarbageBear to ride... oh no, they still have much to vacation ride which contain the 3 principal tenets needed in order to be Legal; wide, golden, and low angle. Those winding and predictable flowing tourist traps are real infrastructure and will not go away once built, much like a road. There is most certainly a reason to measure twice cut once so-to-speak and make sure all these big old bastards are sanctioned.

This is my first comment on NSMB so lets see its not too provocative to post. haha

Cheers gang, good talk.

Owen

Should 40Down have been built? From where I stand, hell yes. It brought a net ~100 great laps to people at least I'd say. That's a tangible positive human life experience metric this readership above all can recognize. That's really cool actually. Say it took 40 hours to dig (guessing) that means all of those hundred riders down it have a ripping good time in their memories forever. The ROI to the community makes it a no brainer for me. Time well spent, volunteer to boot. Cheers to the effort Ziggy, you paid 1 hour of your time to 100 friends.

Through the nature of being pointed fully S.F.D. and existing in a rain forest it has fallen from grace harder than Spacey. It was unridable after a few seasons and now has been mostly reclaimed by the forest and now looks more like some deer have been striding directly uphill than ever having been a recreation site. That's the beauty of unsustainable trails, they are fleeting. Letting them go is as easy and scrapping another one in and watching the rainforest recover. We count on this ability to make forestry viable after all. If cutblocks can flourish on a scale of decades it stands to reason that single track yields to reclamation in years.

In Shore terms; What would be the point of seeking section 57 approval for The Wink ? (had the process existed at that time) Its been said recently that the blue and flowey things have had their moment of attention the last few years on the shore and its time to develop more expert level terrain (a paraphrase of Cooper's comment for NSMBA) but there is a limit to what you can expect to be worthwhile the process.

Personally I think the whole trails act is a very late response to the ladder bridge everything era in trail building. For those tasked with it from a desk in an office in a BC government building hearing about skinnies littering the shore and having the mandate to do something about I'm not at all surprised we got here. Thanks NORSHSHORE! ;-)

Owen

It's the hooners who want more. The process does not have a mechanism to say yes to their request should they make it. If they apply for what they actually want it will bog up the system ever worse because they are going to say no anyhow. If its green, blue, black (flow) and doesn't cross any property lines, is not on private property and is not obviously going to be problematic I say APPLY. Just be patient. For those who tinker on trails as a hobby, the patience and planning ahead to building your one-day approved trail required is akin to being into gardening and having to pencil in how your going to prune your tomatoes in 2021... it just doesn't scratch the same itch.

I would love to see the application -were it to have been written- for one of the best fall line trails on Diamondhead ever, 40Down. It was built, ridden and basically died all in 2013. The hypothetical application would have described an alignment dropping about 400m in about 400m with no counter-grades, drainage, excavation, or capping.

Intended use? "locking the rear wheel and not letting it move until your ears pop from elevation loss while screaming"

Intended user ability? "psyco"

Proposed difficulty Rating? "black and red triangle diamond prism"

Legacy Maintenance Schedule? "Nah, just leave it mate, its pitted"

It wouldn't have been worth the Rec Officers time to read then and it's not now. The process is for vanilla, if you want picante you better make your own batch of chili

Owen

As of today Jan 7, 2019, In Squamish there are fourteen Section-57 applications at the desk of the local -severely resource sapped and over subscribed- Recreation Officer. His charge being the review and processing of all of them, a task that not only requires desk work and red tape treading but actual alignment walk through and terrain/waterway assessments etc. Getting I believe 1 summer contract technician to help, his fairly taxing work load reflects the spike in applications since the media blitz in the spring. There was a huge outcry APPLY APPLY but no additional resources to process the new applications.

I'm happily in possession of an approved S57 at the moment. March- Sept was the process. Six months from initial phone call. Believe it or not they prefer to screen your potentially good/bad idea in a quick verbal elevator pitch. I suppose to prevent the Not A Chance ideas from causing wasted time in the procedural mess that is even NO. Simply flat out denying an application still takes time in this system and diverts the few resources the Rec Officer has from working toward a possible approval on another application.

Now, six months sounds really good right? I got lucky. I'd done this before, I had the phone numbers, I knew the people who new the people... I knew I had to help myself if i wanted to go the legit route and not wait years. So I crossed all the t's and dotted the hell out of the i's then made myself the squeakiest wheel I could while playing nice.

I had written endorsement from the forestry Land Manager, SORCA and the blessing of the builders of affect adjacent trails included in the S 57 application. I wanted to deliver it with a cherry on top and see how fast it CAN happen. Also on my side was that the trail would be only 900m long, require no timbre falling, structures/bridges, would ave no major creek crossings, property lines or active resource extraction nearby. Any of which can tender your application anywhere from unlikely to glacial paced to dead in the water... sometimes it just means its going to take FOR-EV-ER.

Still sounds pretty good right? It's not. The process is generally 4 times as complex and thusly 4 times the timeframe. Now do the math. Lets just say that up to six applications are being processed at a time in ernest. I haven't the slightest idea how they do it but lets steelman this and start high to extend real optimism. Then lets assume the average application only takes a year. To even process the current back log will be years. For many who are motivated by dismal weather to head out in the truck with a shovel and go scrape something in to ride in spring, that's just not gonna work.

Owen