Kicking Horse Bike Park Trail Crew Update #2

The straight goods on Kicking Horse Bike Park, straight from the trail crew's fingertips.

Stickrock is now open! Phase I was cracked last week. This is Kicking Horse’s first Double Black Diamond trail. Not that it is crazy difficult, but there are mandatory gaps and steep rock slabs, so you want to have a good hard look and think about the trail before committing. But it is designed to flow; all the gaps can be cleared at casual trail speed. No need for death-defying leaps of faith. If you are comfortable riding all of Spiral Tap on Pioneer trail, then you are ready for this one. It was already my favorite trail before we even started decking.
Stickrock is being built to replace the lower half of the original Roadrunner. That trail has eroded so much in the past 8 years that most of the dirt is at the bottom of the Kinbasket Lake reservoir. To avoid that happening again we made this trail almost completely out of lumber and rock slabs. Sticks and rocks. Stickrock. Get it? The old Roadrunner trail that Stickrock replaces is not completely gone however. The last two rock slabs of Roadrunner still serve as the exit of Phase I.

There have been many other additions and improvements as well. The trail crew and patrol are staying busy with head-scratching trail problems to solve with rakes, shovels, nail guns, etc. Superberm saw some loader action last week. Chuck Gorton was at the controls to once again deftly reroute a couple of speed-killing Z berms. Here’s Aaron Bernasconi from patrol testing just how good his raking has become.


Today Aaron Enns and I began solving the problem of the Ryaneater feature on Blaster. I’m sure a number of you have been eaten by this steep section, but Ryan Kuhn did it with style this year two days before he came in third in the Masters division at Psychosis. That made me feel badly for Ryan and I vowed to make that section friendlier so Ryan wouldn’t have to learn to slow down. Aaron and Matt Cote will finish this tomorrow as I’m going holidaying. This one’s for you Ryan. Just remember: as Aaron says, “Kicking Horse is not a downhill mountain biking mountain, it is a down-mountain mountain biking mountain.


Speaking of Aaron and Matt, they have been busy again in the alpine adding some wood to the treeline on Gale Force.


We have been very fortunate with the weather so far this year. We have been getting intermittent rain showers for most of the summer so the trails are nice and tacky. The dust bowl forming in the west of BC hasn’t occurred here and we are loving it.

We were visited for two days this week by the winners of the Bike Parks of BC Ultimate Road Trip contest. They were led and coached by Shaums March, who seems to know a thing or three about mountain biking. While he was coaching his eager chargers, I took some photos of him with my super special blurry camera.


Also on a similar schedule was the Ride Guide crew with Darcy Turenne, Jay Hoots and Dylan Korba. It is not so often yet that we get such high quality talent here so it was a lot of fun watching those guys do things with their bikes that we all like to think we could do if we ever really tried.

Other than that, all I wish to say is if you were able to carry a good tube all day in your backpack until you got a flat, couldn’t you also carry your bad tube to the garbage at the bottom of the mountain instead of throwing it beside the trail? You know who you are. We are sending someone to your house right now with fingernail pliers.

More info at www.kickinghorseresort.com
Ride on.
Crowe

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