Here’s ours:

Monday Morning Debrief 21

Show us your worst examples of gravel trail killers….

half of cyb

That gravel is a nightmare to ride on. I can’t see how with health and safety they can lay a dangerous surface on what is a legitimate cycle path.

Salisbury Plain, £500K of ‘improvements’. This is the Northern perimeter track that’s actually a byway.

That’s stuffs a dawdle on a Fatbike btw….

Why can’t they spend the money on roads instead? Our road surface needs replacing. Putting aload of agrigrate down does nothing.

Not sanitisation exactly, more organised sabotage. This what is the bridleway at the top of Windy Hill (the big transmitter mast above the M62) looked like last Friday:

Now, I grant that this particular bit of trail was a rutted, boggy mess (mostly due to the ‘cheeky’ MXers who ride it regularly) but I’m not sure that it’s been repaired to the required standard, as they seem to have just dumped an old mill on top off it or something.
Lots of lovely shards of glass mixed in with all that random rubble:

I consider my tubeless setup to have been thoroughly tested after riding down that lot. Can you get puncture-proof horses, I wonder?

That’s worth reporting

Hmm, yeah, you’re right. Who would I report it to?

Congratulations to Devon County Council for over-engineering a bridleway tidy up and turning one mile of exhilarating twisty, downhill singletrack into an autobahn..

Before…

Just About to Roll Over the Hill and Tackle Fishchowters… by Slugwash, on Flickr

After….

They’ve F**ked Fishchowters # 2 by Slugwash, on Flickr

start with the local Rights of Way officer

slugwash- they obviously got another country in to do that. Props to them but fack. Thats a job well done.

@nbt et al. How long has it been like that for does anyone know. Not been over that way in over 6 months & its still exactly the same.

Mintimperial,

I’d be wanting to see their license for tipping or exemption certificate, EA would be interested in that as its not been processed sufficiently.

Right. Reported to Rochdale Council Environmental Management, lets see what happens.

When this happened around our way I contacted mbr and singletrack to do a feature and highlight what I feel is the biggest threat to our sport.
Neither seemed that keen.
My next thought was to contact Clarkson from a drivers point of view, moaning that the countryside was smoother than our pot holed roads.
There are a lot of local bikers who have the opinion that ‘I don’t care,I don’t ride there”. They don’t realise their favourite track could be next.
I’ve moaned to my local council and their response is that they have the money and have to spend it. This comes at a time when our local hospital is at threat of closure.
Someone in charge of MY taxes needs a good bollocking.

Spending the money is fine, can they not do it properly though? Just lazy.

Pipehouse

A year or so on it is beginning to revert, but not a patch on what it was.

Argh!!!

@mintimperial, I was going to use that BW to join into a Marsden Loop that I do.

How much of the BW has been dumped on?

Cheers
Paul

Ride them as you find them. Life’s too short

Thankfully not of my “good stuff” has been sanitised, however quite a lot of the wider tracks that had streams running down them during the recent rain has have had a load of gravel dumped on them. That’ll last ages when the rain returns inevitably.

Also stone “bridges” have been built over some of the streams, with dirt on top. These bridges have been built on top of a plastic tube.
Where there was a little stream to hop over/ride through there is now a 2mx2m area of ankle deep mud OVER THE BRIDGE that takes an age to dry out. That was well thought out then.

I think the crux of the matter is the people who do these “improvements” know **** all about sustainable trail design and building. It’s purely a money spending and ticking a box exercise for them.

How much of the BW has been dumped on?

A good few hundred metres, but you can ride round it pretty easily, don’t let it put you off. It’s just the very top section so far although they’re clearly intending to go quite a way down it by the looks of things.

A real shame – couldn’t they have left the big rocks in and done their gravel tomfoolery on top? at least it would stand half a chance of getting back to how it was…

the resurfacing that takes place around our way (East Surrey/Surrey Hills) is driven by horse riders as far as I can see. One glorious trail in Farley Heath got clobbered, even though there was a parallel sandy bridleway running paralell 200 metres away! Farewell narrow gulley almost shoulder height – so much fun!

Langley Vale got resurfaced recently too – thankfully the rain is cutting through back to the chalk and I can report from yesterday’s ride that its starting to be fun again 😀

TM

The Outwood Trail is currently being “improved”.

I can see the need for a commuter “dry line” but to carpet the whole thing with a 10ft x 1 1/2 mile strip of gravel is a bit OTT.

A local trail to me (Bleedin’ Lisa) was sanitized about 8 years ago, with a bit of judicious assistance from, ahem, the unknown dog walker the trail has been reinstated to its former glory by rainwater diversions during heavy down pours to assist the gullying and step forming process.

One bits so good now that my really gobby, thinks-he’s-a-riding-god friend was reduced to shaken, pale, silence after trying to follow me through at the “conservative” speeds I ride at.

Unfortunately the water company are now going to be working across it so I so the unknown dog walker will have to start back at square one.

Swinley!

deeside railway got sanitised recently – from boggy mess to tarmac footpath ….

its most excellent to commute to work on without getting clarted and speedy to boot.

not all bad – they did ruin tyrebagger though. – ill let bruneep post his photos from there. “wheel chair accessable” was the line used.

A few years back Janet Street Porter was moaning about the sanitisation of the approach to a mountain in wales.
So its not just us bikers who don’t like it.

A few years back Janet Street Porter was moaning about the sanitisation of the approach to a mountain in wales.
So its not just us bikers who don’t like it.

Horses too then.

This is the before photo:

There isn’t actually an after photo yet because the path has been closed after some serious rain damage for around six months or so now. I post it to reassure those who think that any sort of gravelled surface is going to last very long. Until it rained properly, this was a singletrack bridleway that had been ‘restored’ numerous times with a combination of gravel and weird fibrous cloth stuff – most of it ended up half a mile down the lane at the bottom along with a fair bit of the tarmac surface of the lane itself. 😉

God only knows what they’ll do when they get round to restoring it… 😉

I feel some sympathy for the people in charge of managing these routes when confronted by mountain bikers.

They get moaned at because a trail is a lumpy unrideable mess, so they put down a lovely smooth gravel path. Then they get moaned at because it’s too easy. They must sometimes think we’re being deliberately difficult, and as a user group we can be a little bit “goldilocks”.

It’s too difficult, it’s too easy, it’s too lumpy, it’s too smooth, as a user group we can encompass opinions ranging from “trail centers are too smooth”, to outrage that people have been braking and leaving bumps!

I wouldn’t like to try and keep us happy, we’re a bunch of asshats. (Not me, of course, but the rest of you. 😉 )

And let’s not forget, they don’t only cater to us, they have to cater to at least some access for EVERYONE, right down to the unsteady on their feet or in a wheelchair. Someone wheeling Granny to the viewpoint doesn’t relish the challenge of slippery roots and rock drop offs.

I think a likley effect is to drive us on to footpaths tbh
IMW santising makes it crap to ride and not much easier to walk as it is still up a steep hill in the countryside

It winds me up all this sanitizing – there are mountains in the Lakes that you could take a wheel chair up. Now I’m all for equal rights, but that’s taking it a touch too far.

Fortunately the weather is so gash, that give it a winter or two and as has been said before, it reverts back to it’s previous state, sometimes even better.

[img]http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Travel/Pix/pictures/2011/12/2/1322837780701/Mountain-biking-in-Wales-007.jpg[/img]

Mmm… sadly I also feel some sympathy for councils who have to manage routes, I suspect they look for inspiration by google-ing mountain bike trials and get pictures like the ones above, and probably think ‘well our section of trail isn’t as steep but clearly that’s what mountain bikers need/like’ and build nice wide trail smoothed over with compacted gravel.

I wouldn’t like to try and keep us happy, we’re a bunch of asshats. (Not me, of course, but the rest of you. )

That’s fine, because basically ‘they’ don’t give a stuff what we say or think . Keeping mountain bikers happy is so far down the agenda that it may as well not be on it at all. So actually your sympathy for ‘the people in charge of managing these routes’ is somewhat wasted.

Regardless of everything written above, the usage of our tax money should be put to better ends. No one on the planet would prioritise smoothing out the countryside over keeping a hospital open.

In defence of councils, I’ve been mostly pleased with trail sanitation done round Hertfordshire. Several trails that were pretty un-ridable for a reasonable proportion of the year have been made rideable. Tend to look fairly hideous when first done, but after a couple of years it’s hard to remember what they were like before.

Regardless of everything written above, the usage of our tax money should be put to better ends. No one on the planet would prioritise smoothing out the countryside over keeping a hospital open

Personally I’d prioritise trail smoothing over say buying special ambulances for fatties, but that’s just the inner fascist in me 🙂
I think it’s different pools of money anyway – trails are council tax, NHS central taxation. Could be wrong though.

No one on the planet would prioritise smoothing out the countryside over keeping a hospital open.

I doubt anyone has, I’m pretty sure they’re different budgets.

don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you got til it’s gone
they paved paradise
and put up a parking lot

why don’t they just sanitise a strip of it? half for the wheelchairs, half for the xc core gnarr riders.
and I’d take gravel over sand anyway – bleedin horsey landowners putting it down for their bleedin ‘orses.

Plus I blame all the complaints on people having too much suspension and too big tyres. Drag that old rigid muddy fox courier out of the shed with a set of 1.75 tyres and it will all seem gnarly enough again.