Welcome to Berm Peak.
My new home, and the new set of this YouTube channel.
To ask if I’m planning on building trails here is like asking Drama if he eats food
off the floor.
Rest assured this loam will be put to good use, but have patience.
I still need to move my life into this place.
Berm Creek is now for sale, which is hard to believe considering we only spent about
2 years there.
But in that time we built a garage workshop, a bike wash station, a bike dungeon, and of
course, Berm Creek itself, with it’s many features and wooden lawsuits.
But Berm Peak is gonna take more than two years to be anywhere near finished.
It’s a little bigger.
And so is the house that sits on top of it.
Lest you think I committed a bank robbery, you should know something about rural America.
This house and property is equivalent to a one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.
Should you find yourself choosing between the two, I suspect you’d come to the same
conclusion I did.
But not so fast: There are tradeoffs.
Out here, you can’t get sushi, or uber, or even pizza delivery for that matter.
Trash pickup?
That goes in your pickup.
And the fact that the prior owners installed a generator hookup, foreshadows the frequent
power outages I’m likely to have.
But I knew damn well what I was signing up for, and those things aren’t really important
to me.
I’m here for the space, the privacy, the amazing dirt, and this beautiful garage.
This is Castle Braap, a garage with a detached house.
Watching these three doors open is enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Going back to my first house, the garage was this outdoor closet crammed full of bikes
and tools.
My second house, Berm Creek had a one car garage, which at the time was more space than
I knew what to do with.
But I filled it up somehow.
Now we’ve got a three car garage with 14 foot ceilings, and it’s more space than
I know what to do with.
With a garage like Castle Braap, bad weather can no longer throw a wrench in my weekly
videos.
But there’s something else that might.
This is a Hughesnet dish.
It’s…like airplane wifi, better than nothing.
I’d be better off driving to California with a thumb drive than uploading 4k videos
on Hughesnet, and the very fact that someone installed this dish indicates that they did
so, because it was better than nothing.
Believe me, I called around.
I even asked the cable company how much they would charge to run a line.
They pretty much laughed at me.
This place is just too remote for any kind of decent Internet connection.
So, I guess I’ll be camping out at Starbucks two towns over.
Unless…
Hold that thought.
This sim card is my ticket to the holy grail of rural Internet.
It’ll get me half a terabyte of unthrottled LTE on Verizon, which is the only service
that works out here, at all.
With this cellular router, an external antenna, and a little creativity, I may be able to
patch together a workable solution.
So I’m mounting all my network hardware in the attic above the living room, and running
a wire to the peak of my house to mount the antenna.
This is normal, this isn’t sketchy at all, I only need to do this once.
So I ended up doing that completely wrong, and after like 10 trips to the peak of my
roof, I got it working.
And you know what?
The speeds are freaking decent!
I have a 19 megabit upstream, which is better than the cable connection at my last house.
I can’t tell you how big of a relief this is, because I actually bought this house not
knowing whether this plan would work.
That means Berm Peak is fully operational.
So let’s take a closer look at what we’re all interested in.
The land.
On the North side of Berm Peak is Moonshangle Thickets.
It’s a mouthful, but we’ll just call it Moonshangle for short.
This slope is absolutely covered in rhododendron, which is going to make trailbuilding here
pretty labor intensive.
Still the dirt is unbelievable, and it’s steep everywhere.
My plan is to build tight hand-cut trails here with some North shore elements mixed
in.
Moonshangle is so vast, I still haven’t hiked all of it.
But there’s another zone higher up the mountain.
Stumpthorne.
Stumpthorne is a little flatter and more open than Moonshangle, so it’s the perfect place
to build jumps and features.
Since it’s up top close to the garage, it really is the perfect place for all the goofy
stuff.
Most of Stumpthorne looks like it’s been partially cleared, and possibly graded in
some spots, so I’m not really concerned with preserving the natural feel like I am
in Moonshangle.
Since Stumpthorne is higher up than Moonshangle, I should be able to build connector trails
between the two zones and make continuous runs from top to bottom.
According to the elevation map, this should give us about 150 feet of vert, and I’m
pretty sure that’ll give us a downhill run that lasts well over a minute—maybe more.
Berm Peak, Castle Braap, Stumpthorne, Moonshangle Thickets…
I know it’s a lot all at once.
But this is gonna keep us busy for a good while.
I hope you’re as excited as I am, and on that note this is a good time to give you
all my sincerest thanks.
Without an audience, I’d be in a completely different line of work.
Your views, your likes, your comments, your shares, and your criticisms, are all what
brought us here.
I never thought that at 34 years old I’d be doing what I love while entertaining an
audience of a million and a half people.
So now more than ever, I have a burning desire to build wooden lawsuits all over this place.
Perhaps someday I’ll be kicking myself for passing up that one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn,
but for now I’m stuck out in the boonies on the top of this mountain.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
And now, it’s time to get to work.
Thanks for riding with me today, and I’ll see you next time.