I Built a Trail!

Photo: Me! (Sorry for the bluriness)

I’ve been riding for around 3 years, but I’ve never actually appreciated what went into building a trail. I used to think trails were just something that magically appeared, and I used to wonder why my local trails couldn’t be more fun. Now that I’ve actually tried building a trail myself, I see trail building in a whole new way: blood sweat and tears and have a newfound respect for trail builders.

Since we were out in Long Island for the summer, where pretty much all the trails are cross country, I realized this would be a good time to try building a trail myself. Unlike almost everywhere else in the north east, the dirt here isn’t filled with rocks, so it would be easier to dig. However, the hard part would be selecting a spot with decent elevation, and lack of Karens who would want to destroy our work to build long island’s first downhill trail!

Luckily, we found a hill above a skate park that actually had decent elevation (for long island), and where people were riding dirt bikes so we figured anything goes and started construction. Looking back, I’m very glad we bought some sheers because there were quite a few bushes that we needed to cut. Although the upper portion required some quick raking, the lower section was very dense and our progress started to slow.

After two days of sheering and raking, we finally had an outline of our trail that was actually rideable. Our next task would be to add in berms and bench cut some of the off camber areas. Bench cutting is where you carve a flat surface into an angled hill side, and it was actually much easier than I expected. Sure, our trail didn’t require much bench cutting, but we still worked at a pretty fast pace. Berms, however, proved to be a bit more of a struggle. We found ourselves building what seemed like a finished berm, before realizing we had to pack it down, and ultimately cut the size in half. In short, berms are a lot of work. There was one massive off camber section at the bottom of the trail where we realized we couldn’t add a berm since it would be way too much work, but luckily this part wasn’t as off camber as other sections we did bench cut.

With the berms done, my dad decided it was time to add in some jumps, and built a step down half way down the trail, and an optional table top at the bottom. Upon seeing this, I was horrified and realized that the table top was way too sketchy, and needed to be turned into something else. After some deliberation, we decided the only solution was to widen the run in, and make it into an optional huck to flat kicker. The step down was way too close to a corner before, and we still haven’t figured out a way to fix this.

Anyways, after 4-5 days of hard work, it was finally time to test out our trail! It turned out to be around a 10 second run and was super fast! The berms actually turned out pretty good and are pretty fun to bomb through. The step down is pretty terrible, and the huck to flat makes for an awkward challenge. Overall, I’d call this a success as we achieved our goal of building long island’s first downhill trail, regardless of how short or sketchy it is. Building this trail also proved to be useful experience for potential future projects.