Volunteering Is Giving

Trail Maintenance Thursdays: Go!

Trail maintenance Thursdays continue for 2014. 6pm every Thursday. Tomorrow is not an exception. Come help out tomorrow. We need you.

Winter War Mups

Baby, it's cold outside...how in the world are we going to make it to spring when it's this cold now?

Here's how...

-- FIRST --

January 28 we're going to gather downstairs at Acoustic and watch SingleTrack High. It's a film about kids who ride. There will be beverages and food. It will be a fundraiser for FAST too because we always need a money to pay our annual insurance premiums.

-- SECOND --

December 14 - ONE WEEK from this posting  - we're supporting The Riddlebox Fat Bike Endurance Race. Complete details and registration is here - riddlebox.eventzilla.net. Our in house chef - Adam rocks in the kitchen - seriously rocks - is makin' egg bakes for the 8am breakfast.

Also, and this cannot be overstated, Adam rocks in the kitchen.

-- THIRD --

We're looking ahead toward spring and adding singletrack. We want to complete the northend trail in Leaders Park to Homestead. We want to add and expand a section on the easy loop. Finally - and no promises here - we've done our part - other parties need to do their parts - we walked through here this fall to better see what singletrack would look like.

-- FINALLY --

We're going to go out anyway, even if it's cold. We welcome all sorts of non-motorized activities in Leaders Park. Snowshoes, boots, bikes - what else? Come one out. It's beautiful in the winter too. HOWEVER, if it's wet not frozen, please stay off.

The Riddlebox

Did someone say egg bake? That's us marking our place down there in the bottom right corner of the image. We're happy to have our in-house chef prepping some eggcellent egg bake for Saturday.

RiddleBox Fat Bike Endurance Race - December 14 - register at http://riddlebox.eventzilla.net

BIKE IT!!!

It's Time For An Update. Ready?

First and most importantly - we've moved our trail maintenance day to Sunday. We've moved our trail maintenance time to 3pm. We're keeping our meet spot at Lowell & Homestead the same, at least until we move it.

In summary: 3pm, Sundays, Lowell & Homestead intersection.

There's plenty to do. Seriously.

For example. The Vandals are back and we must keep up with them. The exit ramp off one of the wooden obstacles has been removed and must be replaced. The joy of The Vandals is we never know from week to week what they'll be assigning us.

For another example. It's fall. The leaves are falling. The leaves are falling and covering the trail. The trails are covered with leaves. This presents a grand opportunity. The opportunity is to define the trail by raking the leaves to the edges of the trail. Defining the trail pays dividends well into the next season because it focuses the riding. Help us rake. You don't even need to bag the leaves when you're done. We WANT the leaves to stay.

--

Now let's talk about our volunteers. There were 8 of them last Sunday. Yeah. 8. 8. With 8 people stuff gets done.

Adam, Ben and Kyle from FAST! Yeah, they count. Janelle, Pete, AJ, Bob & Colin. First of all, AJ! Second of all, Colin was out riding and got off his bike and picked up a rake.

They improved bench cuts by digging. And they raked. And they rocked.

Volunteers. We owe you. We won't forget.

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If you don't follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook, you could.

We're Moving Right Along

We're two Thursdays in to our trail improvement and expansion. By attending both work sessions Janelle, Chris and Evan are leading the way through the park. John, Nate and Phil are right behind them.

We're not asking for huge commitments from our volunteers. Adam and Ben will be leading the effort on Thursdays nights until the work is finished or the weather gets mean. Come out and move some dirt around for a couple hours. If everyone who likes us on Facebook came out once before the end of October we'd have 41 people a night!

Adam says this about Thursday's progress, "100ft / 2hrs = 50ft/hr...50ft/hr / 6vols = 8.33ft/hr/vol...average by IMBA standards and we were in the deeper of bench cuts..." - which is what we're asking for. Come two hours on a Thursday and scratch 16 feet of trail into the ground.

Thursdays. Start @ 6pm. Finish  @ dark. The meet spot is just east of Lowell Ave & Homestead Circle.

Some Trail Expansion: Build It

We’re expanding the singletrack at Leaders Park and we need your help, please.

At the very northwestern part of the park there’s a severe elevation drop to the north bridge. This portion of trail gets lots of use by the neighborhood because it’s the most direct route from Homestead Circle to Ronning Park at the top of the hill. We’ve seen quite a lot of deterioration from erosion and traffic. It’s time to change the routing.

This deteriorating section of trail also roughly marks the northern border of Leaders Park. We’ve spent some time around a table with park’s leadership describing the whys and wherefores of what we want to do. We’ve also spent time showing them a roughed in solution to our problem.

They agree it’s the right thing to do and the right way to do it.

Here it is: we’ll go north, gradually down the hillside and south to reconnect to the bridge. We will also connect our trail to the east/west portion of Homestead Circle. This provides an access point; additional on-street parking spaces and a nice connection through the park for people utilizing our trail for FUN transport.

It’s a modest expansion but it’s also the biggest publicly available singletrack expansion within 70 miles of Sioux Falls in two years.

One week from today, Thursday August 29 at 6pm IMBA trained Adam will lead a learning and trail building session at the park. After Labor Day the work will continue on Thursday evenings until the build is complete. Please commit to a few Thursday nights between now and the end of October.

The meet spot for the learning/building session is Homestead Circle & Lowell Ave at the north end of the park.

There are no trail faeries. Singletrack exists because people build it.