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Saturday 4th April 09 - Trail-building Workshop
People present included Ric Balfour, our mentor for the day, a number of Wamos club members, a healthy turnout of people from DOC, and a WAMOs photo person who turned up in the afternoon. Ric is one of those people whose enthusiasm is extremely infectious and his experience in the task of building MTB trails is probably as great as anyone in the land, if not the world! The club had decided the best time to call on his knowledge and expertise was before we built our first trails rather than some time afterwards, when we might have already made errors. DOC and the Waipa Council (through a community grant) had both come to the party in helping to cover the cost of the day, since the club has insufficient funds at this stage. Our club would like to express our sincere appreciation to them for this generosity and also for their goodwill towards the idea of mountain-biking on our magic local mountain. In particular the Council has been gracious in allowing us to do this preliminary trail work while the lease arrangements for the site are being finalised. Much extremely useful information was imparted during the morning theory session held in the St Saviour's Church in Pirongia Village. But with the sunny autumn day calling us up the mountain and into the wilds, everyone was keen to get up there where the air was cooler, the birds were singing and the view was sweet. So we drove up Sainsbury road, through the gate and into the bush to the area of our future new trails. Brendan and his helpers had obviously been doing a lot of homework in working out the best place to route the first trail; It was all marked in pink, ready to be discussed, modified and/or built. Ric explained some more important principles of trail-building, showed us the tools and how best to wield them, and the workers got stuck in. It was incredible how quickly the trail took shape once everyone got to work. Refreshments had been provided courtesy of TA Cycles and some volunteer home baking! Much emphasis was placed on conserving the forest while building the trails with minimum visual disruption to the forest scene, the objective being to make it look as though the trail had always been there even straight after it was completed, and re-planting as many uprooted plants as possible when it was necessary to remove plants at all. Ric also emphasises building the trails in away to minimise ongoing maintenance - a matter of thinking about drainage, careful route choices and the angles of the trail itself. Also how to plan and build according to the needs of the intended trail user at whatever level of rider they may be. Ric discovered a juicy looking huhu grub but no-one was game to have it for afternoon tea even though we have all heard how delicious they can be.
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