Well, it should at least cut dirt.
And that’s what we need it for because today our work Rhodorooter continues.
Last week, we built a wooden berm after the kevin jump and despite my doubts, you can
freaking torch this thing, so much so that the following turn needs a berm too.
Now this new berm won’t need to be perfect.
It just needs to be better than a flat turn.
So we’ll build it out of dirt and follow the natural slope of the land.
But we won’t have much time to do it, as usual.
Step one is to use our newly sharpened rogue hoe to cut away the top layer.
The loam on berm peak has the consistency of shag carpet, and is mostly composed of
tiny roots.
This is why we leave it in place wherever possible, as it holds up in pretty much all
weather conditions.
But when building a berm, we’re after the clay beneath.
Just as its name implies, clay can be shaped into just about anything.
But once you get to it, you’ll find a mixture of rocks, roots, rotted stumps, and other
stuff that we’ll want to rake out before shaping.
But before we rake anything, all this clay needs to get broken and churned up.
And we don’t have time for all that.
The tiller is our one and only machine—a really
small machine.
As we learned on airbag trail the tiller doesn’t work so well on loam, as all the roots get
tangled up in the tines.
That’s why we’re only firing it up now after all the loam has been cut away.
With the clay now tilled, it’s consistent enough to rake into the shape of a berm.
As we shape it, the clay needs to be packed down, and in my experience that takes a few
days as the soil needs time to dry out and harden.
We still have something else to build before the rain moves in, so I brought in some help
to speed things up.
Almost 200 pounds worth of help.
We used the plate tamp on the gravel road project, and I was able to use it to compact
a landing in mere minutes.
Despite its weight, the plate tamp isn’t so hard to move around since it propels itself
forwards using vibration.
With this thing on deck we should have a rideable berm in a few minutes.
Alright so I just figured something out... this sucks.
The Wacker packer doesn’t work so well on wet clay, and actually it’s counter productive.
But Kevin and I discovered a little trick to compacting this wet stuff.
I don’t know what this crushed rocky mix is called, but whoever built this house dumped
tons of it in the back.
If I can mine enough of this off the forest road, it’ll make a nice top layer that won’t
stick to shovels or the tamp.
We call it grey pow.
And since our mine is pretty close to the berm, this task shouldn’t set us back very
long.
Now to give the wacker packer another run.
That time, it worked.... far from perfectly but enough to get this berm semi running today.
But it’s time to wrap things up because we don’t have much time left.
And I’m planning on building something else.
After this berm is that log hop into the steep section, and I want to use the speed from
the berm for a little feature before it.
This will be a great opportunity to use some of this wood, and a bit of scrap plank not
long enough for other projects.
We’re building a miniature version of a much larger feature you’ll see at bike parks
and slopestyle courses everywhere.
I’m calling it the pecker log, and we’ve got approximately no time to build it if we
want to ride this line before the rain.
As you can see, the pecker log is simply a planked out log, proudly protruding from the
Earth.
And, it didn’t take us very long to get running.
And we have just enough time to give this line a test.
The Berm was running really slow, but I expected that.
It’s gonna need some work, but we have a good starting point now.
As for the pecker log...
Of course my GoPro wasn’t on when we finally realized, there’s something very wrong with
this feature.
It’s actually been a long time since I crashed, but having it happen due to shoddy workmanship
is just a kick to the... well, we need to fix it.
It
turned out that I would have had the time to build this right in the first place.
It only took 15 minutes to brace solid, and that wasn’t worth careening into the woods
over.
This pattern of trying to beat the rain has gotten me into trouble before, and it looks
like I may never learn.
But now, we have a pretty fun line, and it’s fast.
REALLY Fast.
Did I mention I love my hardtail?
Rhodorooter is coming along nicely.
We’ve got the roll in, the berm, the kevin jump, the wood berm, the soft unfinished berm,
and the little pecker log.
But we need to get this all dialed before moving on to the icing on the cake, the big
feature we have planned for the beginning.
The goal? have that thing finished right before the official start of Spring.
Thanks for riding with me today and I’ll see you next time.