November Rain and Ryan Leech

Today I had a great day of biking. I rode/built solo early in the morning. I was the first one up the hill at The Woodlot, so I had fresh tracks everywhere I went. There was allot of blown down trees all over the hill after the recent storm we had. On Stove Top I was not able to move them all, but I was able to clear everything on Tsuga. My route was Stove Top up to Tsuga and then down Tsuga to Snakes and finally Shotgun. When I made it to Snakes and Ladders, she was in really good shape. Only one real puddle and that will be taken care of in the near future. A branch seemed to fall off a tree onto one of our bridges and broke a piece of rung clean off. So this was the first part of the trail I needed to work on for the day. Once I made my way down to the tool stash near the rock faces I gathered some tools, found some rung and made my way back up the trail to fix the broken ladder. Once I split, nailed and trimmed the wood there was no way you could tell that anything had happened. Well except that the rung was a nice light brown colour freshly cracked and trimmed.

I then made my way back down to the rock face to continue putting more rock on the trail. I rocked in another 4 feet at the base of the rock face so that there is now about 8 feet of large rocks that will never move out of place. Maybe another 4 feet of BIG stuff I and will be totally happy. I then had to do a little shaping of the land because mud was forming in one spot near the little jump. After that I put in about 8 feet of BIG rocks at a corner that Tim framed in when he was last up there. I piled in a dozen or so large rocks and covered them in gold dirt to cement them together. There still needs to be rock done before and after the section that I rocked, but I filled the majority of the low spot and got a good start on rocking in the whole section. Somewhere in here we will need to engineer a drain to ensure that water has somewhere to escape.

Earlier while I was rocking in the bottom of the rock face a huge group of riders came down the trail. It was a group with the MR cycle group ride. I recognized one of the riders as he was riding down the line and it was Ryan Leech. He stopped and talked with me for a bit. He was amazed by the trail and the rocks I was working with and overall he was stoked. Ryan is a total class act and a genuinely nice guy.





So after I finished all my work for the day I geared up and rode down Snakes and made it to Shotgun. Once again I blasted down Shotgun with reckless abandon out to my car.


Later in the day at 2:00pm I took Norah to Maple Ridge Cycle where Ryan Leech was putting on a trials show for the year end MR Cycle biking club wrap up. I managed to get Ryan Leech to sign a poster for Norah.

Good very good day of biking.