concrete fun

I haven't been working on finishing anything at the trails lately. This past week I have been riding some ditches and bombing some hills. Sessoms was my favorite hill until a couple of days ago.

I would say it was about 5 months ago we were driving around town looking at houses and neighborhoods when we stumbled upon a good hill. Since that day I have wanted to ride down it and see what kind of speed you could get up to just by coasting. My name for the hill is Hill-45. It's not a very long drop, but maybe about 800 yards at the most but it's really hard to tell because it drops sooooo fast. I would say that for every 2 or 3ft you go out you drop almost 1ft, it is a very steep grade.

I went down the hill by myself on my way to ride a ditch. I started decending and got nervous after about 8 seconds so I started lightly grabbing my brake. It felt like I was close to high speed wobbles but it was probably my imagination since I have never gone that fast on my bike. I walked back up the hill and hated every step. I went to the ditch and rode with Glen and told him that we were going back to the hill and he was going to follow beside me in the truck and tell me how fast I was going once I stopped.

I didn't touch my brakes until the very bottom because there is pretty sharp turn that you have to make. I drifted way to the left side of the road and planned on hugging the inside of the turn and then go wide on the exit and then cut back in on the next turn and exit it wide. The bottom of the hill is the shape of a U but the bottom is somewhat flat. My plan wasn't going to work so I put my foot down like I was on motocross bike and began squeezing my brake when my back wheel started fish tailing on me. I decided to go to plan B and jump into somebody's front yard to slow down. I didn't have time to put my foot back on the pedal so I had to bunny hop up the curb going fast with one foot on the bike.

I get back to Glen and ask him how fast I went and he said that he got up to 45mph before he hit started slowing down while I was still accelerating. I guess that I may have hit 47 or 48mph and was doing about 30mph when I jumped into the peoples front yard.

Looking down the hill




Looking up the hill


The ditch outside of Glen's apartment



Glen concreted this dirt lip


I haven't gotten this 'wallride' down yet. I have rode up it successfully once. Glen has also install a concrete lip on the corner so you have a good little hip.


The entrance and fly out exit out of the ditch

Carpet + New Line pics

This is what the carpet helps prevent.


Now for the new stuff. This will be the first real double in the line. I expect to have a lot of rollers/doubles before this jump.


Side view. The trees make it hard to see the outline and distance. From lip to landing is about 11+ feet, but I'm not really sure. It looks longish when standing in front of it.


After the first double there you'll pump down into a pit and then back out of it.



After coming out of the pit, you'll hit this step-up.



Here is looking at the landing of the step-up.


Looking over and down the step-up landing. The landing goes into a berm that is also a lip.





Just to give you an idea, here is the first berm with carpet. Basically I had carpet left over so I figured this was as good of a place as any.


Just looking down the line at all of the carpet.


6 pack Straight line has carpet, even the roller.


PUMP TRACK PIC'S
I basically used a wheel barrow to move a bunch of dirt that I just had piled up. I'm not going to try and describe the layout but I will put the picks in order of how it will go once you're on it.
These are the first 2 rollers after the main line.



Same berm as the pic above, just coming out of it and not going into it. The berm will be much bigger, this is just a small layout.


2 rollers out of berm




Original 10 pack is also covered with carpet






Other original jumps that were here when I moved down here.







This is the setting of of the woods before jumps were built. I plan on doing a little more clearing out and building more lines in these areas. I try not to cut any trees out, but it ocassionally happens, but they are either dead or really small.