The Pie Run

The Pie Run at Glentress is 10 years old today.

The Pie Run Opening Celebration. by moonter[/url]

This was the first Trailfairies project that I made a significant contribution to, and the start of trailbuilding at Glentress becoming a regular fixture of my life. Plus it’s a great trail, so I wanted to acknowledge the occasion. 🙂

There’s a Trailfairies ride out happening tomorrow so feel free to come along. 10am at the lower overflow car park at Glentress. If you don’t know what any of us (e.g. Northwind, stevenmenmuir or me) look like, keep an eye out for the green and yellow Trailfairies jerseys that some of us own. Or just ride up to the first clump of riders you meet and introduce yourself. It may not be us but you’ll probably end up making some new friends anyway…

Great trail – thanks!

It seems to be a very Marmite trail. Lots of people (myself included) really like it but plenty don’t. Some people would be very happy if all the trails at Glentress were more like Spooky Wood so a tighter, relatively rooty trail like the Pie Run doesn’t really fit into what they want from the place.

It’s a lot longer when you’re pushing a barrow of hardcore. Think that’s also where the International Standard Jaffa Cake box measurement came into being, a sign proper engineers were involved. Also the scene of the floodlit trailbuilding session. Some GT legends in that picture.

stevenmenmuir – Member
It’s a lot longer when you’re pushing a barrow of hardcore. Think that’s also where the International Standard Jaffa Cake box measurement came into being, a sign proper engineers were involved. Also the scene of the floodlit trailbuilding session. Some GT legends in that picture.

Didn’t the Jaffa standard came about when we were building the drains for Mushroom Pie?

Thanks to all who put the effort in to build and maintain it, we all take those trails for granted but there’s a lot of hard work done so we can enjoy ourselves. Love pie run myself

+1 DaveyBoyWonder & rOcKeTdOg

To be fair, the Trailfairies are but one party involved in the construction and maintenance of the trails at Glentress. We are happy to receive your compliments (hearing people wax lyrical about the Pie Run without them realising they’re speaking to someone who helped build it is a great feeling) but there are many great trails at Glentress that were built by others.

That said, over the years we’ve helped build or maintain almost every trail at Glentress. I think it’d be easier to list those trails we haven’t worked on than the ones we have!

Also if you’ve ever been tempted to come along to a Trailfairies session don’t worry about it being too much like hard work. We’re a volunteer group, you can work as hard or as easy as you want to. Working hard does help build up an appetite for the cakes though. 🙂

Glentress needs more trails like that, love that kind of almost natural with a bit of grooming stuff.

DaveyBoyWonder – Member
Glentress needs more trails like that, love that kind of almost natural with a bit of grooming stuff.

Almost natural? 😀 It’s about as close to a natural trail as a waymarked red graded trail at Glentress will ever get, but it’s anything but natural. It was built by digging a roughly 3′ wide and 8″ deep tray into the earth along the entire length of the trail (while painstakingly leaving as many roots as possible in place) then backfilling the tray with hardcore and compacting that with a motorised wacker plate. The trails at Glentress, particularly those on the red, see so much use that they need to be built to be very resilient.

Building a trail like the Pie Run is seriously labour intensive. We had really good turnouts for the Trailfairy sessions while it was being built, and there were other groups working on it as well and it took 6 months to build. I love it, but sadly the FC doesn’t have the resources to build many trails like it. It is much easier for contractors to machine build more open trails without roots than it is to produce something like the Pie Run.

Your best bet for more similar trails at Glentress will probably be if we get to build more enduro trails like the Glorious Five Year Plan and B Side, but these are less groomed (not surfaced at all) and tend to be more challenging to ride. However something like the Glorious Five Year Plan can be hand built in about the same time it took to build the Pie Run, despite it being a much longer piece of trail.

You might be right Chris, my memory is not great. There were a lot of man hours went into the pie run, don’t think that’ll ever happen again.

Well I hold out some hope that the Trailfairies will at some point get more people coming along to sessions again and if we do then we’ll be able to attempt more ambitious projects. I agree though to the extent that a heavy duty trail like Pie Run is less likely, when less bombproof trails can be hand built much more quickly and still hold up fairly well.

I am however beginning to doubt my memory about the Jaffa boxes. Perhaps they were first used as a guide as to how deep the Pie Run’s tray should be?

I’m away again this weekend but one day i will actually be in peebles on a werkend of trailfairying!

By almost natural I mean tight and twisty and not just had a digger go through it. Same as home-baked at Gisburn.

Selfish(ish) thread bump.
Firstly I’d like to say I love pie run (and pies in general) and am very grateful for the hard work put in to the trails by the chaps on here, thank you.
Secondly, I’m up in Peebles for a week next Saturday and want to maximise my quality trail time because apparently “this holiday’s not all about you”. So can those in the know point me in the direction of anything new that I shouldn’t miss. I don’t mind climbing if it gets me somewhere good but I’m still running my ancient giant Trance so fast and flowy over rocky and droppy would be good.
Thanks if anyone can help.

Out of interest, is ‘The White Stick’ (off the fire road to the mast) a trail fairy creation? Its all over trail forks so happy to detail the location roughly.

Out of interest, is ‘The White Stick’ (off the fire road to the mast) a trail fairy creation? Its all over trail forks so happy to detail the location roughly.

Nope.

Nope.

Presumably its for an enduro in the future then? Who actually builds the off piste stuff that the trail fairies aren’t responsible for?

Off piste?

Trail Trolls.

Presumably its for an enduro in the future then? Who actually builds the off piste stuff that the trail fairies aren’t responsible for?

More for fun than anything else really.. Most of the unofficial stuff is built by the Banksy’s of the trail building world..

Pretty sure it isn’t finished given its state last time I rode it 🙄