Project Completion: Curt Gowdy Middle Kingdom

The crew finished up the two new trails in the Middle Kingdom area of Curt Gowdy State Park near Cheyenne and Laramie, WY.

Singletrack Trails was tasked with constructing two more sustainable mountain bike specific trails with goal of creating and inviting segment for riders that aren’t quite comfortable with getting their wheels off of the ground and those that enjoy some good air time.

It took me a bit to get back up to Wyoming to meet with the project manager to walk the trail and get some photos. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, so here are some photos that I took with my phone.  We will get out in the spring after the snow melts to shoot some video and photos.

Ridgway Pumptrack

In early October, Singletrack Trails’ resident flow farmer James Flatten made his way down to Ridgway, Colorado to work on a hybrid pumptrack construction project.  A hybrid project is one where many different parties help to supply parts to complete the project.  In this case Ridgway local Sara Ballantyne organized the permissions from the Town of Ridgway, got rental equipment donated.  The Town of Ridgway had a stock pile of dirt to use.  Singletrack Trails provided the layout mastermind.

It is always amazing when so many moving parts can come together to complete a project like this.  Here is a short slide show of the completed work.  There is still some packing and shaping to be done by the local riders that helped James out.

Burn Canyon Flagging

This fall Singltetrack Trails worked with the Norwood Parks and Recreation District and the Uncompaghre Field Office of the BLM to create a conceptual trail system in the Burn Canyon area near Norwood, Colorado.  After the computer conceptualized proposal was made public at a meeting in September, it was time to go out and ground truth the trail corridors for feasibility.

The conceptual proposal included about 25 miles of trail.  On the ground in October, we flagged about 27 miles of trail in some of the most beautiful terrain on the Western Slope of Colorado.  Below is a map of the final alignments that are now ready for site-specific surveys.

Here are a couple photos of the area that we flagged.

 

 

 

 

Back at Curt Gowdy’s Middle Kingdom

We are back at Curt Gowdy State Park in Wyoming to build two more segments of trail in the Middle Kingdom area.  The Singletrack Trails crew has an eye to the west as we try to complete this project before winter shows up, which can happen on a sunny 70deg day in Wyoming.

The goal for these trails is to compliment the trail we built last year called Let ‘R Huck.  We hope to build two linear pumptracks that will be fun for all riders at the park.

Here are some photos from Day 1 of the build.

Here is the video from Let ‘R Huck

Hanson Larsen Memorial Park

The last few weeks have been spent up in Rapid City, SD working with Dave Dessel with Trail Arts.  This project is a majority of intense hand construction to create an intermediate trail at Hanson Larsen Memorial Park.  Dave is on the other side of the drainage running the excavator building a large portion of the machine construction.

The weather was quite warm when we arrived in Rapid City in August.  Fortunately, we have been working on a north facing slope in the tress for a little bit of reprieve from the sun.  After we return from a Labor Day break the weather has begun to break into some nice Fall weather, which has help us accelerate our construction.

Here are some photos from the project so far: