Pumptrack progress and more...

It's absolutely dumping in the homeland. They've got more snow than all of South America right now. Hard to say what my life would be like if I was still there, would a deep pow day still feel the same? The photos coming out of Durango right now are killing me, but I have my own little paradise in the backyard, at least until the snow falls tomorrow night (white Christmas in Nashvegas??).

Yesterday I got a bale of hay to combat the stickiness of the mud/dirt on the pump track and after a little grading and some digging, I've got it going on out there. Complete laps, at speed, just a few modifications and I think I'll start planning the Big Loop. The vision is wider spacing and some jump-able features, like a dirt jump run within a pump track. I'm not sure Sarah knows what the yard's about to look like.

She seems fine, however, with how it looks now, so after digging and riding from 10-3 today (my back will be killing me tomorrow) I have this to show for it:

this is the first turn I built, a super tight 180* that leads down the backstretch seen below:

the view from inside of turn 1, the 180.   you can see the cross-over to the left of the second roller and all the way at the end, turn 2:

this is turn two.  I completely rebuilt it this afternoon.  I knew it was too small when I built it, but it was relatively easy to build bigger and steeper and it's made it clear that I need to do the same thing to the other turns.

this is the view from the new jump-entry point I built before I put the tools away.  You can see turn two in the upper left, the jump in the lower right, turn three on the left, covered in straw, and the new entry berm in the middle.

Here's a video:

Next on the agenda is to start building a series of table-top jumps leading into the entry jump.  I gathered a bunch of large chunks of tree my neighbor cut down, seen to the left in the third photo, to use as fill in the table-tops.  These should save me a lot of dirt moving over the next week and they probably won't rot out before I'm ready to re-build the jumps anyway.
Snooped around looking for info for the Pofahl I posted earlier this week, didn't really find much about the maker, just this video of his son riding up stairs:



I did, however, stumble on this sweet bike from Fisher:

only $1299 with adjustable dropouts and a split rear triangle so it's Single Speed or Belt ready. A Fisher is a Trek, and a Trek is not what you want, but it's nice to see Trek making something interesting and sexy.