MTB Trailcare

One of our milestones was reached this week.  We recommenced working on Three Hills about 8 weeks ago and set our "sights" on the fallen tree in the last couple of trail news.  Back then it was far ahead

It was so far uptrail that we did not even see it in until 3 weeks ago.  A week ago the base was cut and the trunk fell a few metres below the trail line.  Now we are past it 

There is about another 50m of steeper terrain before we get to the flats near the top of the drainage between hills 2 & 3.  It is tempting to think things are about to get easier.  They aren't!  Flat terrain means deep and poorly drained soil.  Excavating drains can be difficult without getting industrial.  

We will see how that all goes when we get there.  For now it is more dust and benching.  Here's what we did this week.  We started with the milestone tree as our key feature

This spot had us thinking hard

At first it was going to be on a major rock wall and platform.  However, that would have created a very steep climb and erosion risk.  Then we thought we could deeply bench the trail below the pinch between the trees and make the line a high point at the trees.  In the end, we slowly excavated and found no major root systems.  We were able to reduce the climb, bench the trail fully with a low point between the trees and also allow for the trees doubling in size over 20 years.  Check the pics later in this trail news.

This is how we started bringing the tread down

and how it ended up

When we were walking out after finishing this bit of work, I put my foot through the tread and into a hole.  A bit of poking around today located a huge subterranian network of tunnels, no doubt where an old tree had rotted away

We decided to dig the entire area out to a depth of up to 45cm and fill it with large, paving rocks plus lots of tiny pebbles, all covered with excavated fill as per the following pics

The final result looks really smooth.  It may not stay that way, being largely big chunks of rock

After this unexpected work, we had less time to progress the trail, but we did make a few more metres with some developing grade reversals through the creek line after the milestone tree

We had an audience from  Flacco the Goanna for a while (named after Paul Livingstone, the comedian, as Flacco's tail was coiled when we first met).  He was happy to wander about a bit and chill on a log

We are now at least 65% of the way through Hill Two and itching to see more of it completed.