BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE

For the second time this year the east coast of Queensland has been impacted by a significant rainfall event. Trails have been closed and there will be another round of repair work to get them open again. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I spoke on an Outdoors Queensland webinar about trail recovery and reconstruction from the rainfall event we experienced in February. During this webinar I was asked what can be done to better manage the impacts of these rainfall events in the future. Given the impacts of climate change are becoming very clear to see, it is a great question; what do we need to do to prepare for a climate with more frequent and extreme rainfall events?

Taking the lessons from my local trail network, a few things became clear; trails with sustainable alignments or had recently been maintained had minimal damage, and trails where there was a significant percentage of rock in the soil profile sustained less damage than more friable soil types which makes sense, but we have to work with the soil we have.

I use the term ‘Trail Resilience’ to describe how we need to approach trail building and maintenance moving forward. Resilient trails will get water off more often, will keep riders on the trail, and will limit braking and other forms of mechanical erosion. Building more resilient trails is much easier when creating new trails. You can put a trail where you want it, manage the grade and the features you are adding to the trail. New trail construction can also utilise innovative building techniques like lifting and tilting the trail tread as pioneered by Garry Patterson of TrailScapes to create more resilient trails.

Building resilience into existing trail networks is more difficult. Older trails are often not aligned well and have years of wear and tear affecting how sustainable and maintainable they are. Building resilience into these trails is also challenging as any required works will likely change or impact on the nature and vibe of the trail which creates angst with riders. Without a complete machine makeover, the works to improve existing trails will also often be completed by hand.

So where does this leave us? I think builders are already reading the signs and are building resilience into their designs and builds. The real challenge is building resilience into our existing networks. I see this as a two-fold issue. The first issue revolves around using volunteers to build bigger drains, bigger grade reversals and install heaps of rock armouring. This is all labour-intensive work that will very quickly burn out volunteers.

The second issue is the ongoing need to source funding to allow for paid trail maintenance to do the heavy lifting maintenance activities, allowing volunteers to ‘do as much work as they want to do to’ maintain the trail network. Transitioning to a paid maintenance model with volunteer support for most trail networks is going to take a while.

The mountain bike industry, government, and our corporate partners have not quite got to a place where the return on investment for mountain biking has created the environment for funds to flow. The unicorn that is Derby is both a poster child and an unattainable goal, I am not sure there is another Derby in Australia, yet we all seek to emulate Derby’s success.

While I digress into funding models, in the short term we need to build our trails to be resilient to extreme weather events. I always stress quality over quantity when we are doing trail care. It might be a case of identifying the areas of your network that are susceptible to damage and build resilience there first. We just need to start somewhere. Happy digging.