Recent snows, rain and cold weather (which keeps the trail from drying) have conspired to keep most mountain bike trails closed for the last month or so. That there even was a race Saturday was the doing of Amy Burke and her crew at Harris Lake. Race Director Chris White said Burke, who oversees trail maintenance at the park, had four people working on the trails full time last week and seven other employees pitched in when they could, building new boardwalks and infilling gravel in spots left perpetually wet by the recent snow and rain. The 8-mile course was soft in spots, but certainly rideable. Nice work by Burke & Co.read more
Follow live coverage of Saturday’s Meltdown at Harris Lake 6-hour endurance mountain bike race on our Twitter network, JoeAGoGo. Coverage begins 7-7:30-8ish and goes until about 4 or I have a coronary because I haven’t been on the bike for an hour — let alone six — in the last month. Promises to be one entertaining event, since the nearly 60 riders registered have been sidelined by the recent wet weather.read more
Twenty-seven people can fit into a trail shelter built for 12, sometimes you find Little Debbies tacked to a wall and they restore your faith in humanity, there are 165,000 blazes along the 2,178-mile Appalachian Trail .
The things you learn when you think you’re going to buy socks and you stumble onto a seminar.read more
Raleigh will break ground in April on one of its most anticipated stretches of greenway: the 3-mile House Creek Greenway. Runners, bikers, distance walkers and other greenway enthusiasts have been especially interested in the greenway because it will link the 11 miles of completed Crabtree Creek Greenway to the east with about 14 miles of greenway running from Meredith College, over I-440 to the N.C. Museum of Art, then along Reedy Creek Road into Umstead State Park and into Cary. Some quick cyphering reveals the House Creek link will create a 28-mile network of greenway.* And that’s only taking into account greenway already open.read more
If there’s anything approaching a guarantee in the world of greenway construction — a world in which delays are the norm — Raleigh’s chief greenway planner comes close to offering it.
“We’re operating on a 4-year schedule,” Vic Lebsock says of the city’s most ambitious one-shot greenway program yet, the 28-mile Neuse River Greenway. Construction on the greenway began last week.read more