Day Nine, The Hill

Ragged Mountain is a really cool place, from super neat rock formations to cliffs, and the many streams running down it. It is very daunting just hiking to sections of it to see if they would be suitable for a trail. Even just looking at maps it is intimidating. This plays into the next stage of my project heavily. I need to be able to think about the terrain over huge amounts of land, because if we start climbing one direction, but our goal is in another, there has to be a change of direction at some point. In building climbing trails, or just trails in general, there should not be a sustained grade of over 10% for much more than 20 feet. It gets too challenging and tiring. This roughly translates to a 10 foot over a run of 100 feet. This needs to be factored in trying to match up with section of the Wilsons Wonder Trail that are good and do not need to be redone. As there are other trails that branch off of the trail, there are spots that need to be preserved, as those are identified and factored in, it might get more difficult to layout the trail. All of this being thought about, I did more hiking and laying out today. 

Some trees that were not down a few days ago

I decide that today would be a bit more of a rest day, so I slept in and helped David a bit in the morning. His pump track is coming along nicely, the rollers and berms are shaping up, and there is a good section that is ridable. After lunch I headed up and began to do more laying out. I wandered a good bit through the woods, and found a cool old road, which I would assume was a skid road, but it seemed a bit wide and too nice to be a skid road. 

 Looking down the cool old road

I did find some cool stuff while aimlessly wandering, a rice cooker bowl, a pair of scissors, and a really cool tree. It was all bent and nifty. 

Nifty bent tree

As I find cool and weird stuff, I also find nice places. I have spent a fair amount of time sitting on rocks in streams, on small cliffs, little piles of pine cone bits from red squirrels having a snack. There are also a lot of wildflowers and cool plants. 

Kinda cool double layer plant

Critter Cam

I have been a bit sad that I have not seen many critters lately, so I have had to improvise. 

Here we see a wild Stewart in his natural habitat, watering the dirt. 

Wild Stews are routinely seen watering dirt or riding tricycles