Transition: Day 9 (of 26) - Finally, a Full Length Run
The morning is berm raking, which is the exit of Original Spin which is now the entrance of 1 of our 3 main runs. I prep for the day by clearing off all the junk accumulated on the trail over time. This is one of the older trails so it's reasonably well-burned in. But the raking process in this system is a never-ending task.
I do my homework for the most part of the 7-10:00 block this morning, with a brief break to have breakfast with D. I work on a Performance Analytics module, which is this sort of "reporting trends over time" thing that people want their static reports to do. It's sort of a hot-ish thing, though in my experience nobody ever has the data to support this kind of shit. Most orgs have garbage for data. Plus it's really complex when you dig into it.
I jump out on the road at 11:00 and what a fine day it is. I do a moderate loop because I know I'll be out on the trails (Kingdom Fails? I always liked the show Gravity Falls but I can't work that in. Either way I need to name this thing) later in the afternoon. The day is just amazing. Every day should be like this with maybe rain every 7th day (Tuesday) so you know how awesome you have it the other 6 days of the week.
When I get back I take the 2 older ones to get those signs you put in your yard for graduates. Normally this is probably not something we would do but I think they kids need anything right now. I actually feel bad that they have almost 0 social interaction in their lives. Julia asked me what we're going to do with them this summer and I asked her what she wanted to do. She replied that there's really not anything we can do. I'm not sure what to say to them.
We eat lunch then I go out and do some work to put more boards on the log ride. The transition was ok but required full attention. As this is part of the "return" to the top, we discussed this and wanted to make this a bit more autopilot and less all-hands-on-deck, if you know what I mean. My sander ran out of paper so they came out a little imperfect but when you ride it you'd never know.
Actually did a work call with one of the kids there and helped him out with something. We talked a bit about his future here and after this. I was pretty much his teacher while he was here so I do feel a little bad about leaving him in a lurch. In just a week he says that things have started to go sideways a bit but this doesn't really surprise me. I've been seeing this for however many months. It's likely only going to get worse.
After this we went outside to work from 3:00-5:00. I finished up the log ride above with Simon, and we graded the intro to this a bit. There's a stretch of dirt between the end of the Boardwalks and the start of this (Leroy the Ladder?) with a log pile in between. We groomed the piece between the log pile and Leroy. The flat bits of trail are not exciting for anyone, but now and again I like to try to make it all smoother.
Then Zac and I got to work on the big project of the day. The former exit of Original Spin. The rocks on the left have been there for 3 years now, and we basically removed 2 full wheelbarrows of dirt to get this to the below state. You come tearing into this at high speed so we wanted to make this pretty angled. As much as it is, it's still not enough to stop me from breaking into this. I need to cut the wall down lower and remove some of the dirt on the right.
We used 1 wheelbarrow of dirt for Charles Barkley and the other for the crossover fish berm (below). The far side is dug out on the right and the near side is dug out to the left. So you sort of crossover this thing when you ride. Ideally you're coming at this from the left, towards the camera. You then exit onto the run into the kicker. In between the Fish and Charles, the trail really needs to be dug out properly because we're kicking up shit left & right now that we're actually riding it a bunch.
We end up riding for almost 20 minutes moving time. While I still think we have a bit of room to work on this, it's starting to get to the point that doing session work is really a bunch of fun. I'm starting to think that June 1 may be optimistic in thinking the whole thing will be at some v1 state. Actually, I guess that's not fair. We're probably already at a v1 state. But every time we ride we stop, fix stuff, ride more, fix stuff, then tomorrow we'll wake up and pick up yet another new project to work on.
So here is 1 of the 3 full runs. This is probably as complete a run as we have to this point. That said, towards the end we have a roughed in piece of ST that needs some work.
The thing you come to realize as you ride it a bunch is that things fall apart, fast. For each jump we put in, we're constantly riding on the edge, kicking junk onto the trails. upending rocks, ripping rocks out of the ground, and causing things to fall apart. The dirt dries out really fast and our filtering method makes that worse. Any clumps of dirt we dig up go through the filter, so they end up being unpacked and put in. We can step on it, tamp it, slap it with a shovel for a while but it takes a long time to really pack in.
In the evening when I water the grass I also bring the second hose out and water the things we've built. It may actually make some sense to put a watering can up there and when we build something, water it on the spot. I know it'll take some time to properly wear in. But anything we can do to speed up the process would be good.
I built Adirondack chair #4 and it looks nothing like this, which is sitting out front of our neighbor's house. I wonder if D would let me take it, add it to the system, and plant flowers in it.