Trail Building Tips: More Rock Armoring & The Importance of Good Dirt

[@kevinhys7260]

Awesome dude...

[@A.T.TrailWorks]

Thanks

[@4door2seater88]

these videos are a great find for me since i'm struggling with jungle problems. I have a bad situation right now, wonder if you have any ideas. This trail I worked on, essentially with no planning, just hacking in wherever seemed most hackable, led us to creating this dumb dh exit where we basically had to sculpt a backslope that's only about 8 feet long, but 52degrees steep, and into a sharp left turn. The problem is stable cribbing for that turn. The turn is made with semi sandy soil within the crib, but the backside of the crib is all mushy and rooty jungle dirt. It's on an edge, and to there's nothing else beneath that crap dirt. We pushed back worst of it and piled on relatively sandy clay but stability is still bad. Stakes don't stay. Do you think that throwing rocks behind the large cribbing log will stabilize that dirt, or do you think it'd be better to do something like joining that log to the other crib logs that are more stable? My concern with that idea is that those logs are stable as they are, but if the one that isn't gets moved that it'll ruin a larger portion of the trail. This part is exposed to the sun and gets crumbly.

[@A.T.TrailWorks]

Taking the path of least resistance can sometimes work but if you're eyeballing slopes and such, you'll make the trail harder and less sustainable than you intended. Sketching it out on a map before hand and then exploring will help you avoid getting into situations like this. You'll end up building yourself into a corner with no easy solution out. Option 1: You might have to reroute it before you get to that trouble spot. The sandy type soil is just not going to keep a shape. If you have a long period of dry days it'll wash away with the first downpour. Option 2: If you got rocks nearby, get as many as possible and put the biggest rocks you can find on the outslope of the trail and fill the tread with the smaller ones. Option 3: Which I'm not a huge fan of (mainly for aesthetic reasons), but some people have bagged the sandy stuff in sandbags, big old rice bags, or put tarps over ramps and berms made of sand. But since a majority of the area consists of that sand, it'll just rut out whatever you don't bag or cover in a different spot, so it doesn't fully solve the problem. It also makes the trail look like you're riding in a garbage dump.

[@4door2seater88]

@@A.T.TrailWorks Think option 2 is what I'll try first. Though the third seems to have been the go to around here on older trails. The bags are all ripped now and there's chunks of it around, and the stuff that is newer in bags, well, it looks like bags. Actually this morning I did try something else, not sure how it'll hold, but I was able to stabilize the area pretty good by kind of building a crib for the backslope of the main crib. Covered it all with descent clay and it looks nice, and isn't very shifty. Rocks aren't that plentiful in the area but there are some areas where the military made these lots full of non round gravel. So I may try using some of that .