Back in my day, playgrounds were gnarly.
Back then you could catapult your kid brother from a seesaw, or send your classmates into
low earth orbit on any number of glorious rotating masses.
But today’s playgrounds have fallen victim to the crusade on fun.
And the caution tape that lines them today is an unintentional reminder that people are
actually the only thing dangerous on a playground.
But here on our playground, mountain bikers make the rules.
So today, we’re building a seesaw you can ride your bike on, otherwise known as a teeter
totter.
I’ve decided to build this contraption right here, just a few pedal strokes after the rock
garden.
Last time, we revamped the upper section of this trail, which is now action packed from
the very top, all the way to the bottom of this rock garden.
After that is a sharp turn followed by a roughly cut flat section.
This is where we’ll build our teeter.
But not before giving this stretch of trail an overhaul of its own.
To build a berm here we need some kind of backing.
So I’m positioning boulders in a trench, and piling additional rocks on top of them
to form a sturdy base for our berm.
These rocks were collected from several trailer loads of free dirt, and I’m glad we didn’t
just bury them in a landing somewhere.
On top of the rocks, we’ll pack in hero dirt.
As we move into harder to reach places, using the gator to transport dirt gets a little
awkward.
So as we move further away from Berm Peak’s access roads we’ll need to focus on features
we can build with what’s already out here.
This
berm will take a few days to harden, and in the meantime we can get the trail ready for
the new teeter totter.
I’ve never built one, and here there’s every challenge one could encounter including
an off camber tread and a tight corridor.
Plus, I want to do something a little different.
On a teeter totter you have the support, and then I guess we’ll call it the teeter, which
has some sort of an axis in the middle.
For the teeter part, I want to go with a concave shape to hopefully make it flow better.
But this will make things a bit more complicated.
To accomplish this, I’m using 16’ 2x12’s for the sides.
To get that smooth curve I’m using one of the planks as a template, bending it between
some blocks, and tracing it.
This will achieve that concave shape, and give the sides a sort of canoe-ish, pirate
ship profile.
In fact, I might just refer to this thing as the pirate ship because it sounds way gnarlier
than teeter totter.
The center of the teeter will be prone to the most abuse since it’s the thinnest,
and will have an axle running through it.
So, I’m doubling up the sides and using construction lags to hold it all together.
The rest, I’m just bracing with blocks to keep it all as sturdy and lightweight as possible.
To make
this thing teeter, I’m drilling holes in the end of a steel rod, so we can put washers
on it and keep it located with cotter pins.
And with that, we can start figuring out how to put this pirate ship together.
Using concrete would help, but I don’t want to use that down here.
Some bracing and preparation, and we’re ready to mount
our teeter.
I had no choice but to try and beast mode the teeter on to the mount because otherwise
I’d need to spend 30 seconds installing temporary blocks.
And that’s what finally did the trick.
With the teeter mounted, we can
now work
the dirt.
The
pirate ship teeter… it’s pretty scary.
I didn’t consider how steep it would be with the axis so high off the ground, but
hey this is Berm Peak.
It’s gonna be interesting when we get some other people out here to ride this.
As killjoy fun vultures continue their assault on what’s left of America’s playgrounds,
some of us will seek out playgrounds of a totally different kind, where you can still
go fast, feel weightless, and experience exhilaration instead
of boredom.