July 2014
This is a pretty late post, but I felt this was a post that needed to be written.
In April I had graduated from Western Technical College with a welding degree, my first college graduation. Yes, I was a little late but I had taken the time to grow and figure myself out (4 years after high school!), but that's another story. I had my first job offer before I had even graduated pipe welding at Blackeagle Energy Services in Berthoud, CO in between Fort Collins and Boulder. This had been a dream of mine to live in Colorado for years and it was finally happening.
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Copper Harbor Trails Festival. You must go.
After a few months passed by I was getting restless. I contacted Aaron Rogers of the Copper Harbor Trails Club in Copper Harbor, MI (now under the name Rock Solid Trail Contracting, LLC) and had still had the offer to go and build trail in Duluth, MN. This was also a dream I had really wanted to see through. I had taken many courses on mountain bike trail building including a Trail Master Certification course from Mike Riter of Trail Design Specialists out of Georgia. After much pondering and weighing of pros and cons, I took the job. It was a bittersweet last night in Colorado. |
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My last night in Colorful Colorado.
I pulled up to a big beautiful newly renovated trail house in Duluth 16 hours later. Before I could even unpack I met the crew at Spirit Mountain, Minnesota's first mountain bike accessible ski hill just down the road from the house. The guys were half way done with Spirit's first downhill race course. |
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| Nils Hempel dropping the rock at Spirit. |
Shortly after introductions were made, the DG, also known as the Duluth Grill, was our next stop. This was our main source of nourishment at least three times a week, the place was out of this world. The DG has anything and everything organic, from the Huevos Rancheros Skillet to the Smoked Salmon Wrap to the Quinoa Curry Bowl, this place had it all.
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| 13402: The Trail Haus |
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| Duluth Grill boasting its fresh grown veggies right in the lot. |
The Duluth Traverse is going to be a 100+ mile mountain bike trail system that traverses through the entire 26 mile long city of Duluth, MN. We were in charge of building the ending trail sections in the Mission Creek part of the city.
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| Duluth Travers Map. |
Trail Building....what separates the men from the boys. Duluth is a very unique place, a place where you can lose your mind in the woods easily. Many assumptions categorize trail building as digging paths through the woods. Thats half correct. Trail building comes down to a fine balance between building a trail that is a ripping good time to ride but is also sustainable and sheds water correctly. The soil in Duluth made this task extremely challenging. Imagine raking, and shaping miles and miles of art class clay. We dubbed this soil, The GnarClay. Along with dealing with the clay, we were building boardwalks and armoring steep poor drainage areas with paver stones. All of this material had to be hauled in by hand.
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| Morning misty hike into work. |
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| Beaver pond trail on a misty morning. |
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| Trail serenity. |
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| Zebulan Featherly doin work. |
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| The dreaded GnarClay eating everything in its path. |
It was fall, the heat was gone and the colors and rain were here. We had been building for two months now and trails were linking together, boardwalks were connecting spliced bits of trail and we were riding bikes out of work everyday. Even though we were beat tired and struggled to open our hands from swinging tools all day, there was nothing better than gripping bars and riding what you just built all the way down to the house.
