Derailled

My project is the new XC trail at Makara Peak...
otherwise curently known as the North face.

Intermediate trail, not more than 10% grade..plenty of wiggles, rollers etc to keep the track as involving and as much fun as possible, and to drain properly.

It will be almost 3km long when it is finished one day.

Be happy to talk about the hows and whys, approvals etc and just general track building stuff

Here is a map, the new trail is in red...

Sweeet, looking forward to checking out all the hard work up there one day!!

1700m will be cleared and ridable in a month..although not fully finished and polished to perfection. Right now about 500m is hiking only, as we have not done the bit in the middle.

Then we get to set all the cambers, do the drainage, and make it lovely- especially the 12 switchbacks in this middle section.

Then one day add three more sections of about 350m, 250m and 550m (then another 150m)

I would be very interested in a fresh perspective on it

Trail builders have my greatest respect.

Is there a Google Earth layer available for the Makara tracks? Looks like you have one in your picture above.

Hey there Brentd

I am just back from the Tuesday evening session where we had 16 people, great work was done and some potentially wikkid bits planned for next time, so I am excited !

There are individual files for each track on www.tracks.org.nz , (just below the bottom of each map of each track page), or I can email you my big phat file that incudes a massive amount of data?

Cheers

Yesterday we built another 100m of trail through very thick gorse and barberry.
they are THE ENEMY.

Anyhow I often have a tough time persuading people to put bends, wiggles and rolly bits where there we could otherwise be building a flat, straight trail.

There was no need to put two corners in at all, traversing a small 50m wide valley, but we did just for the fun of riding !

It is getting there

Awesome. Staggered to find that you have trouble with getting folk to agree to putting wiggly bits in! Can't wait until I move back to Wellers and get stuck into some more building.

Same problem in Canterbury. Wiggly bits, and corners in general, seem to be a problem. They are either built as a series of silly bermed hairpins with zero flow, or they are absent alltogether. Bring back the FLOW!

I am plotting a trail that will not be piloted for a while.. the dotted lines will be where we need to check the gradients, and the white bits are my guess.

I would like the middle part of the track to have a nice long run between switchbacks

Well time has ticked and we have built lots more.

If you are interested in the progress, please have a look here:

http://makarapeak.org/northface

The main trail (1620m) is done and the top half perfected pretty much.
The lowest trail (Smokin) is done and is huge fun, but we need to make the last 20m neater.
We are scouting the JFK section, which will be started when daylight savings arrives

Part of that is the terrain we have to work with here in chch. When the slopes are super steep it has to be a bermed hairpin or you end up having to take the track down the fall line for too long, which then makes the track unsustainable. Then you get our trails confined to silly little places like Vic park, and you cannot take the track out far along a contour because you run out of space too quickly... so you end up switchbacking down the hill. The Greenwood track is the closest thing we have to "flow" on the hill... but I think that could have been better built if the designers had gone for a wander with a clinometer as well...

I have been wanting to build a similar sort of trail to what Rob has just built in Chch for a number of years now. Gradient of less than 10% and plenty of flow. There is ample room to build it on the slope between the top of Huntsbury and Bowenvale valley. Would just need permission from the council...

Have been up with a clinometer etc and you could get some lovely wiggly flow lines down the hillside, and make proper use of the elevation instead of wasting it by dropping straight down the hill.

You might find that 10% is steeper than you need?
We have been lucky in making the trail very (very very) busy that this gradient should be sustainable all year around. I hope!
Making it 7.5% will make it a third longer, and so on

North Face was set at 10% as it was the smallest incline we could get agreement on. I think less would have been fine, say 7.5% but then we may have had even more trouble finding the ground between the rock faces and the occasional cliffs !

By the way we think over 100 people have helped out so far, the main 1620m North Face trail was built to ridable standanrd in just 14 weeks- absolutely amazing!

yeh, 4% to 6% is prob what i would aim for... But there will be parts with space constraints that will mean steeper gradients are needed in places.

Over 100 people is great Rob. Well done on the getting that many volunteers along!! Many hands make light work (as long as you can get them building how you want the track built!! ).

Well here we are in July 2010, and much of the North Face project is done. We need to clear and bench 860m (which has been piloted only), which will then create 4 trails, which end to end will total about 3050m

This should all be done and dusted before the end of this year.

And, it looks like this:



3050m, 22 switchbacks, 2 big corners, massive fun

If you have arcGIS software you can probably get LiDAR data for $100 and then you wouldn't need to get out and measure anything!

Hi
well sort of.
Wellington City Council has just released 1m grid intervals.. but they are not anything like accurate enough to plot a trail.

The good old GPS is king!