Hopkinton-Everett Dam Trail Day

I finally got to head down to the Hop-Ev / Elm Brook area to assist with building a new trail yesterday. CNHNEMBA has hosted a few weekday rides there this year but it is kind of a long drive for me from Plymouth to try and get there after work and I could never make it in time.

The Hop-Ev land is also owned by the Army Corp of Engineers (same as Franklin Falls) and they are great with allowing access and providing support. There has always been a rough network of multi-use trails in the area but there is potential for lots of great singletrack and there is now quite a few motivated individuals in the area and with the help of the NEMBA troops I think Hop-Ev is going to be an amazing place to ride in a year or two.

We had a much bigger crew than I had anticipated. Lots of local support and a boy scout troop even came out to lend a hand. Our local contact Sharon had already flagged a trail for the day and all we needed to do was lop branches and rake / ride it in. We broke into two crews and set to work on each end of the trail and were able to hash the whole trail in in about 3.5hrs. Final distance came in at just over 1 mile total.

We were able to take advantage of lots of interesting features as well as build up a crossing over a rock wall. There was also a low lying area that is going to require some additional attention which could turn into a really fun / interesting bridge building project.

Loading up our implements

raking it in

building some features

rock wall crossing

the whole crew just after meeting up in the middle

A few of us suited up and raced the sun trying to get a short ride in to see how our handy work panned out. It actually rode really well and was much firmer than I had anticipated. I think this trail will ride in quickly as long as we can get some consistent traffic on it next year. And there were already spots that you could tell will have great flow and be real fun as soon as it is riding a tiny bit faster. Here is the ride data:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/16572072

The new trail is the squiggly singletrack and we added a big loop before riding the new trail in the other direction to head home. Ended up just beating the sun, can't beat that.