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Saturday social - Manly Dam / Red Hill depending on conditions


antonfourie's picture

By antonfourie - Posted on 08 September 2014

Note that this ride is Cancelled.
When: 
Saturday, 13 September, 2014 - 09:00
Come Rain or Shine: 
I'll be there, no matter what the weather.
Ride Database Entry: 
Manly Dam
Meeting Point: 

King Street (near corner with Arana Street), Manly Vale. You know - outside Manly Hydraulics Lab.

-33.781501, 151.258115 (Manly Hydraulics Lab)
Details:

Saturday morning social ride, all levels welcome, either the Dam, plus some extra single track or Reh Hill depending on the rain / sun this week

Who's in?
antonfourie
antonfourie
What Happened?

Were you there and have a story to tell?

Ride Gallery
Moobs's picture

i'm in, pending conditions / opening of trails. Red hill will almost certainly be quagmire.

hawkeye's picture

The amount of standing water and seepage still around is amazing. I would not expect it to dry out in time based on the current forecast.

Might be an idea to make alternate plans, maybe get out of Sydney.

antonfourie's picture

There was a lot of running water on some parts but there was a lot that was ok especially the extra single trail that we do that avoids most of the worst parts.

However I will make sure that it is open and we are not going to do any damage before we go.

hawkeye's picture

Smiling

SIX36's picture

Half the fun is riding muddy trails in varying conditions this is mountain biking isn't it?
If i wanted to be a boring fart id by a road bike with slicks...
Just open the trails & let them be as they end up.

obmal's picture

All well and good until you develop some higher level reasoning.. something like the thought that wrecking a trail that someone took time to build is just a bad thing to do just because you feel that its OK to mess it up for everyone ridding it in the rain.

There's plenty of Fire trails we can ride.

SIX36's picture

Never knew MTB'ing was a dry weather sport, gees why didn't they cancel Cairns DH event.
Its a trail yeah hard work was put in to clear the ST but then just leave it if its gets rutty it gets rutty so be it. Have a maintenance day every 12 months or so if it gets to bad which i doubt.
I don't want MTB trails to be perfectly groomed flat dirt carpet.
Enjoy those open fire trails if that's where u think the fun is.

obmal's picture

My reasoning is that most of the fun(er) trails around these parts are not officially maintained and I'm no trail building expert but I have enough MTB experience to figure out that riding them in the rain isn't good for the wider MTB community.

I don’t expect flat smooth trails, far from it, but some of the nicer ones have (or once had) a good flow that makes it even more fun to ride when they are not all chopped up and widened either by premature erosion (accelerated by rain following wheel ruts cut into the mud of poorly designed and constructed trails to begin with) or just people riding then when muddy.. no matter that they are not built to IMBA standards, the fact is that by me choosing to ride them in the rain = doesn't seem to me a like a nice MTB community thing to do and isn't something that I do these days.

Call me soft or whatever you want.

By all means go and ride them, have fun and keep the rubber side down.

hawkeye's picture

... is one of the things mountain bikers are accused by green groups of causing massive amounts of by riding wet trails.

And they are right to a degree, a saturated trail suffers hundreds if not thousands of times more damage from just a single pass than when it is dry.

Our soils are vastly more fragile than in the UK, NZ, or even Cairns.

If you think just one or a few doing the wrong thing doesn't make that much difference, think again. A few idiots riding wet OMV trails set back the opening of stage 2 by a month and did us enormous reputational damage. A few idiots riding over moon rock has led to moves by MLALC to shut us out if all the land they manage around Oxy.

Land managers watch us closely and won't hesitate to act if we show we cant be trusted to do the right thing.

is that fun really worth it then?

Matt P's picture

What was the last maintenance day you took part in?

rossco_'s picture

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