Mountain Bike Trail Building a Rock Feature at Brevard Bike House

Hey everybody, I'm Kevin and today we're going to talk about trail building. I've been doing a lot of building at the Ranger station with an RC crawler course as well as huge features at Berm Peak. So I'm taking the show on the road and I'm starting to do trails and builds for myself for my own business. Today we're headed over to the Vard Bike House. It's a themed Airbnb around adventure, mountain biking, and being part of the mountains of Pisgah. The trail we have outside has been neglected. It needs a good cleaning, shaping, we might even add a feature. As we're cleaning we're going to use a few tools like the rake, the McLeod, a leaf blower, and a weed eater. All of these things are battery powered which allows me to be a zero emissions trail building situation. This is a small project so battery power is definitely the ticket. Now that everything's cleaned up we need to head down to French Broad to start picking out some material to build a feature. Walking around the stone yard I have an idea of what I want. I've been looking at round boulders with lots of moss on them for the visual and then I also need some flat step style rocks so it can be the takeoff surface from the lip. This rock was actually sourced from a place called Cooper's Creek. We have a variety of style stones that came from that location and I've actually used these rocks before at the Ranger station so I'm very familiar with the product. So just showing up on the job site let's go check this out. I believe the numbers are 1.5 tons of rock and then there's another 1.5 in plates, bigger flatter pieces, more cosmetic. The more boulders have a lot of moss on there so it's going to give a real natural appearance and then the flat stones will help level it as it's building and as well as being a flat riding surface it looks really cool on top. In the trail building one of the things I think that underestimated is that you need to wear boots or I really prefer to wear a high top boot for a few reasons. Number one steel toe job site quality boots or you know there's policy for a reason it's going to save your foot especially moving these sides boulder. The other thing is it keeps the dirt out of your shoe out of your sock. Usually when I get home and I wear tennis shoes I get home and I take my shoes off and my feet are just nasty. I mean I'm about to get a shower and wash them whatever but with the boots on my my feet stay clean there's not just like I'm not just like there's dirt dust all in my sock when I get out to take a shower. Xander is the owner here of Green Builders and he decided he wanted to come out and put his hand in his own feature his own property and I'm really excited to have the help because six tons worth of material isn't going to move itself. We just got the first ton and a half rock moved. I'm going to spare you guys any more time lapse of me humping rock even though I know you guys super enjoy me doing that. I'm going to get the rest of it up the hill and then we're going to jump right in and doing some planning. That was awesome but now what we're going to do is we're going to jump in because we have the rocks here and here now this is going to be a drop this is going to be a landing there's a sasquatch in between we're going to go ahead and jump in here and cut out our shape and get it cleaning and get a landing going. We're going to go ahead and start placing the rocks in the landing so I'm going to go ahead and snug the rocks up as close as I can to each other we're going to filter in some dirt leaving a little bit of spacing so we can get a those rocks in place and then we're going to move on to the lip. So that's going to wrap up the day guys we went ahead and got all the rock moved in position and we also went ahead and got all the landing rocks put in place nice and flat ones locked in a little spacing ready to get a little bit of gravel to lock everything in place. So what we're going to do tomorrow is get that gravel in place I'm going to pick up a push broom at Home Depot so that I can get the gravel on there and fill in all those cracks and kind of lock everything together and then we're going to move on to the lip which everybody's pretty excited about so we'll see you in the morning. We got water we got a blower we got some gloves and now we are jumping to it. I'm pretty excited because we did all the hard work yesterday so what's going to happen today is I get to actually build the feature and building the feature is going to be dope so I'm excited to see how this works out we're actually going to blend both the rollers into this one feature and lower the rollers a little bit so that's got a little bit more flow coming in from the dropping over there so let's get at it. What I looked at here was I wanted to build a multi-line feature so you can make a jump you could roll it you could ride like a rock garden so I'm placing these rocks in a very wide pattern so that you could have three or four lines right off the edge of the lip where you can roll it you can jump it you can huck it you can mangle off of it you can do all kinds of things with it but I want it to be for every skill set rider up from beginner to about a medium level skill set rider so let's go ahead and get some more of these rocks placed in there starting to get hot but what we have behind us it's a sweet full rock landing right there pretty stoked about that the uh everything turned out well I laid it down locked it in with some dirt and then I actually came back with the gravel then blew the gravel out and then I put dirt back on top so it's layered really holding those rocks together really well where everything's locked in place now that landing is super solid now this is the takeoff right here and we've got to get a bunch of gravel in here and then uh then come back and get dirt from that roller over there and we're actually going to repack on the top make it all smooth it's all going to slope back in to grab into the drain that's over there yeah I'm pretty stoked with everything and it might be hard to tell from here let me spin the camera around and if you see from this angle you're actually going to have a line that's going to be all the way this way big tilt to it there's a flat that's right here and there's a tiny rock garden here a lot of work but uh super satisfying I'm really happy I'm doing this and customer came by and said they're really stoked about it the only thing left to do is to ride this feature I just built I'm super excited everything's set in it's been a few days my friend Colin from Flowlife Apparel came out to do some riding with me uh create a notion right now um here's a Twinkie these aren't good for you or healthy for you or anything like that but it's actually important that he's getting a reminder uh a reminder of what a Twinkie tastes like because he hasn't had one in a long time but we'll get back to that after we do some riding he's gonna ride this feature with us uh and test it out he's definitely much more uh bmx than I am so I'm expecting him to probably be a lot more poppier off this thing and I'm gonna have to work into it but that's all right so let's get some gear on and get riding that worked so it looks like everything went super well we found 10 12 different ways to hit this same feature that we built the only thing left to do is to call it a wrap so make sure you leave some comments below there's two links down below to show where you can go ahead and grab your reservation at the bavard bike house more golden brown than golden brown I think that you can roast it however you see that you want to roast it oh I'm starting to see some some effects oh you're deep in there that was pretty quick okay okay so where's your wrapper at so I'll take the other side of the um the wrapper or then I'll take the other Twinkie and you take the wrapper and wrap that around the Twinkie and pull it off the stick so this is a very important part of the situation because if not you have a burning hot Twinkie in your hand pro roasted Twinkie for a first go like oh yeah dark side not overdone at all all right well let's uh let's get first reaction there it's really good better than the Twinkie earlier well yeah all right well um maybe a little crispy but