Last weekend, an energetic and skilled crew of BTCEB trail angels, led by Director Tom Gandesbery, was at Joaquin Miller Park working on the Cinderella Trail.
Cinderella, or Cindy to her friends, is one of the funnest and most challenging narrow trails in the whole Bay Area. Cindy is fast and flowy, but quite tricky to ride well. She’s also extremely popular, so she needs a lot of love, especially during and after rainy weather. (No high-maintenance jokes, please.)
We got some serious work done. First up, was moving the trail away from a fragile culvert edge. You don’t see this culvert when riding, but it’s basically an earth bridge over a large buried pipe. If the edge were allowed to erode too far, the whole trail could be at risk, which would be a tragedy. We moved the trail about three feet over, which involved a fair bit of earth moving.
It also meant sawing through a large, downed tree using completely unsuitable saws! It’s amazing what determination and a couple of glorified Swiss Army knives can accomplish.
Next up was work on the infamous Rock Garden. We wanted to create a slightly easier “blue” line through the rock garden on the right, but without “dumbing down” the fast black line on the left. We all hate it when well-meaning work makes a trail too easy. It’s much better to give riders options, where possible. This involved lots of sledgehammer work to sculpt the new line.
To help riders onto the blue line, we also built a new small rock retaining wall to raise a section of trail up and fix an off-camber bit that less-experience riders would find daunting. Eric Strempke, who normally spends his time working on urban trails in San Francisco, builds a nice wall!
We saw several riders spontaneously take this line afterwards, so I think we got it right.
Further down the trail, just before the trail splits into the old and new(ish) sections, the crew got nicely muddy, fixing a notorious soggy spot by adding a new drain. to fix a nasty wet spot.
And finally, we removed some low-hanging branches from the Castle Park just before the entrance to Cindy. No clothesline accidents, please!
We’re grateful to have Cindy and all the other lovely trails in Joaquin Miller Park to play on. And we’re privileged to be the primary trail stewards at this little gem of a park. When you ride Joaquin Miller, thank a BTCEB trail angel as well as the other groups that we partner with.
Trailwork continues year-round and we can always use more help. The best way to stay informed is to subscribe to our event notifications over at Meetup.com.
(All photos: Rebecca Lewington.)
