Hello Mountain Bikers,
I hope all of you and your loved ones have faired well during this Covid19 event. I know you all are ready to get back to our lives as I am too. The shut down has slowed some of NGMBA’s projects and plans as you would expect, but we have used this time to plan future projects.
We are hopeful we can get back to our social rides and trail workdays in June even if at a somewhat limited scale. We have been working on tree clearing and limited maintenance during the shutdown and most of the trails are in fair shape. We will be assessing the trails to see where the maintenance priorities are and schedule accordingly. The website will be updated to let you know where our work parties are going to be starting in June. As many of you know we will have a work party each month at a different trail. Also NGMBA will be having a club ride at different locations once a month and we urge you to attend. We will still follow the state’s and the land manager Covid 19 protocols for social distancing and/or face masks.
As far as trail builds go, we have been working on those too. Aska’s Fruitkof project is making progress and fund raising has begun. Forest Service is holding a couple of stakeholder virtual meetings in June for comments and input, mostly from adjacent homeowners. Once these are complete then we can move forward with planning for construction later this year. Our goal is to be digging by years end.
Carters Lake will be getting some attention soon too. Our first step is going to be addressing the 2 gravity trails for safety and better flow. NGMBA has approval for 11 more miles at Woodring Branch and 2 more miles of flow trail at Ridgeway, which will be a huge addition to the trails currently there. NGMBA applied for a RTP grant last year and was able to raise the required matching 20% , but we did not make the cut for the grant. RTP grant is highly competitive and twice as many applications are submitted than are accepted.
Cartecay track reroutes will be starting very soon. NGMBA has decided to do a hybrid trail build which includes volunteers and a professional builder. We are hoping for a large volunteer effort including the kid’s teams (NICA) and eager volunteers wanting to learn and build trails. NGMBA will have Walt Brady do a one-day trail building class when we start to train and educate the volunteers who want to help with this project and trails in general. This will be a 1 day FREE trail building class for interested volunteers for this project. We are hopeful this will be a big community effort and we end up with a great reroute to boot. Once the class is completed there will be sections trail to build by hand with volunteers. Hopefully, these skills will be utilized at all our systems over the years. We will let you know as soon as we have dates for the class by email and on the website.
Talking Rock is going to get a much-needed parking lot expansion! The usage at Talking Rock is absolutely incredible to say the least. This is a demonstration of how a successful trail build attracts riders of all levels of ability with minimal trail tread maintenance.
Thank you.
Andy Milton, President
We understand that it is not a good time to ask for membership dollars. We know that, but if this crisis has taught us anything, it is that trails are more important now than ever before.
Please join or renew and help support our trails and future trail projects.
Join or renew during the months of May and June, 2020 and be automatically entered in the IMBA Membership Drive with 16 prize packages. How much does access to your local trails mean to you every month, please consider a recurring monthly membership starting at $5. Recurring membership keeps you automatically entered in the Spring and Fall membership drives.