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Hi Everyone. My name is Gatling and my senior independant project is trailbuilding on the St. Stephen's trails.
This project idea came to my mind when the St. Stephen's natatorium started being built right on one of our coveted trails, Los Loop. This trail was named after and dedicated to Carlos Vasquez, or "Los," so the Devil's Rim trail will be dedicated to him and his legacy.
This project will be connecting two sections of trail that bypass Los Loop to make a nearly two-mile trail called Devil's Rim that spans the top of Devil's Canyon, which separates St. Stephen's with Rob Roy.
As a faculty student, I have nearly grown up on the St. Stephen's campus and have been on the trails ever since I could walk. I have been an avid cyclist ever since I first came to St. Stephen's in sixth grade and have seven years of experience racing for St. Stephen's Mountain Biking Team and riding the trails on the school's nearly four hundred acre land. This project will serve as a final capstone for me in giving back to the land that has fueled my mountain biking ambitions since eleven years old.
Lastly, I want everyone to be able to enjoy this trail on St. Stephen's campus and for the mountain biking team to have a new trail to train and test their skills on. And, for me, I want this trail to be a physical symbol of my time as a St. Stephen's lifer.
Week One
I have worked on this project a couple of times before the Senior Independent Projects started with the DCWP Mountain Biking Team in helping clear nature impeding the flow of the trail. For context, this trail was already roughly cut to make a visible trail, but I have improved the flow and features within the trail during week one. During my stacked off periods, I have ridden my bike up to the trailhead with a bag full of different tools--such as curved handsaws and a pickaxe--to work on the Devil's Rim trail. Most of the work has been done on one large fearture: a naturally-elevated U-turn. This part of the trail is supported by a natural three-foot high rock cave. The exit of this turn is very off-camber, as in degrees of perpendicular elevation, so I cut some unnecessary trees in the center of the U to add structural support to the inside of the turn's exit. Then, I bench cut the turn's exit, which essentially means making the camber have a smaller degree of elevation to make the trail more rideable while still being a challenging feature. After this turn, the trail continues on the edge of a dry-waterfall-esc cliff, where my dad joined me one day in making the trail safer by adding barriers to the edge while also clearing trees in direct way of the trail's path.
Week Two
I started week two off by improving the end of the U-turn, which was still not holding physically but was also still very off camber. It is now very flat and easier to ride, as well as being able to ride it at higher speeds; this will be a park-style feature. As I kept walking the trail, I found a huge dead juniper cluttering the middle of the natural trail path, with hundreds of branches within the maze of this dead tree. While my dad came to help me work this day on Devil's Rim, I chipped little by little until the juniper was out of the way. The next section of the trail had a few major juniper trees that needed to be removed, such as the pink-flagged one with the saw in it--because bike handlebars would hit it trying to go through those two trees--or the green-flagged one so a bike can coast through the pillars of trees around it. Continuing on the trail, I started to pick up on work after the second switchback, or 180-degree turn. This section was impossible to even fit a bike through, and I could barely walk it. This was most likely only a deer path before I started working on this section. Shown in these photos, here are some before and after photos of certain spots in this section. Both saw and pickaxe work were done in each of these photos. Also, in this section of trail, there were a lot of large juniper trees I cut down to make way for the trail in a tight section; though, this is also helpful for the red oaks and other endangered trees because the junipers overpopulate and take the sunlight from these minority trees, so clearing these junipers created much more breathing room for the other trees in this section. Lastly, I used a lot of dead and rotting oak to serve as a barrier on a section with a steep drop-off and an unclear trail direction to show a better trail line and for safety.
Week Three
During week three, I continued the trail after the second switchback. On occasion, I will look back to my work in week two and make fine-tune edits as I go along with the work of week three, which is much slower than week two. For example, I cleared two oak trees--one long dead and one alive. I was able to pull the dead oak out of the ground very easily based on how long it has been dead, and the live oak took a while with the hand saw and was very heavy. There was also a seciton where there was a lot of dead oak bits and pieces hovering above the trail on the fall line. This is not good, especially if the branches are big because the fall line carries all debris down with it. This eventually would cause tree branches falling onto the trail in the future. So, I moved all of that oak to the bottom side of the trail. This is beneficial for drainage because when the rain falls down the trail, the dead oak on the bottom half of the trail holds other debris from falling down while not impeding the trail itself. Where I have made it to by the end of week three is a natural spot to deeply assess how the trail I have cut will connect to the trail below it, that is already cut to make the entirety of Devil's Rim. This section of the trail is a problem spot, and I will be in touch with my coaches to see the best way to connect the two trails for week four.
Week Four
During week four, I actually did not work on connecting the two pieces of trail. My coach told me instead to work on making the existing second piece of trail better, and at the very end, come up with a way to connect the two as a final project to the entire project. So, what I actually did during week four was work entirely on the second half of the trail, which was already roughly cut by a graduated senior last year for his Eagle Scouts project. I implemented bench cutting onto almost every part of the trail during week four, so the span of cleared trail was significantly less than last week, but with more of my touch on trail building (I prefer wider and faster trails). I also added a few natural features to the trail, such as this rock pictured below. Though this rock may serve as too much of an obstacle for an omnidirectional cross country trail in the future, it will be great for now in adding some extra elements to a boring section of the trail. One thing I noticed in this section was that there are very dense thickets of woods and right next to it are wide, open ledges. This will make this trail one of the most unique trails on campus and, through my observations, it will have a surreal feel going through different land types, especially with how long the trail is. Lastly, this part of the trail crosses the gulch trail which is just very unique, and the crossing itself is a nice descent/climb in the middle of it.
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