A great deal of the trail building hard graft on the Haldon Forest Park project has been undertaken by a group of volunteer trail builders aka Haldon Freeride. The following people are or have been involved in the building at some stage or other, and your help has been MUCH appreciated. We cant do it without you.
Alan Hayes
David Harvey
Mez Davar
Gav "Crash Test" Harris
Rich Gray
Russ Inchley
Tim Nelson
Aaron
Tony
Jez
John
Stuart
Scott
The other Gav
The other Tim
Mike Tearle & Tim Powles at the Forestry Commission
Please let me know if I have missed you off the list, ive tried hard to not forget anyone.
Although the name 'Haldon Freeride' would suggest that our involvement in the project is only the freeride side of things, this isn't strictly true. We work on all aspects of the project and regularly put work into improving and maintaining the cross country and the freeride trails.
It all comes down to the fact that we love building sweet trails, whether that be cutting through a new piece of singletrack, hauling rocks so we can armour a stream crossing or building a new piece of northshore. We like riding great trails as much as the next man, thats what drives us to do things the way we do. Quality over quantity.
We believe that taking the necessary time to carefully plan and construct a trail is invaluable. If the correct route, materials, techniques and workforce can all be brought together then the results can be fantastic. However this can fairly hard to achieve, but as a result we are learning all the time. Through experimentation and research we have tried and tested many methods, and the most valuable thing it has taught us is that wherever possible it's often best to do things traditionally and as environmentally friendly as possible.
Many natural materials have individual characteristics that make them excellent trail building materials for use in a wide variety of applications. Timber such as Western Red Cedar, Western Hemlock, Chestnut and Douglas Fir are all great northshore building materials, all of them have a good resistance to rot and qualities suited perfectly to their application. For example, Douglas Fir has great strength across it's length, making it perfect for the stringers (supports) that the top decking is screwed on to.
Traditional wood working techniques can be adapted to create easy and simple joining techniques, making construction simple but highly effective and robust. An excellent example of this is David Harvey's log cabin kicker design. Using forest timber and not one nail or screw, they are not only very solid but also about as environmentally friendly as they possibly can be.
Local rock is perfect for creating technical trail features and armouring parts of the trail that are prone to erosion. Using local rock has a couple of added advantages, blending with its environment very well and you dont have to move it very far! A carefully constructed stream crossing on a XC track can keep people moving in all weather conditions or a rock garden can add challenge to a freeride trail and as long as they are built with due care then they should last a long time.
This photo shows a section of half built armouring that we added to part of the XC track. Nothing can be done to stop water flowing down this section of trail during the winter months, and as a result it was becoming quite a bog. So we decided to put in some rock armouring, this helps by providing a hard wearing surface that wont turn to slurry when it rains and it channels the water to the downhill side of the trail where it can be disposed of easily.
Over engineering is a good principle to adopt when building anything elevated like northshore. We build all of our shore as solid as we can possibly get it and use simple but tried and tested methods. Whenever we need to join any pieces of wood together they are always drilled and bolted and arranged so the the bolt is NOT supporting the load, and all of our decking slats are screwed down. We NEVER use nails.
Decking slats never have an overhang of more than 60mm and never span more than 600mm with no more than 25mm spacing between the slats (so you cant get an ankle or wrist inbetween them). Stringers shouldn't span more than 1.75m without additional support or they can start to get a little flexible which can add undue wear and tear.
