Do you know what I mean? Handy riders nail boards to trees and logs and whatnot and you ride on them? What is the name for them? A local rider told me that the park wardens destroy them periodically and they have to be rebuilt. Is this normal?
I found some near my house. I rode my Kris Holm 20 inch down and gave them a try. Very difficult. There was only one with a ramp up onto it and I couldn’t make it up. It was just too bumpy. I tried a couple of flattened top logs but couldn’t mount on such narrow surface. I found me a starting stick which allowed me to ride once I got going.
Then I got the idea to climb up onto the structure and mound at the high points, which were mostly quite wide. I would ride down the slope but had lots of trouble getting back up the inclines. It was all very fun and quite nerve racking. Any advice for future attempts?
As far as I understand, that kind of riding is called North Shore Trails…
I bet Kris could shed some light on the subject. I think the movie Universe has quite a bit of North Shore riding.
Structures like that are often built without the permission of the land owner so they end up being torn down when the land owner finds out about them. Another problem is that they are either built poorly, built with nails into live trees, or built by cutting down live trees. Those are all bad situations and will be sure to piss off the land owner.
In the US the liablity risks are such that a land owner is not going to allow stunts or structures to be built. If they allow that sort of stuff to be built and someone gets hurt they will be in deep doo-doo.
Trails that have structures are often kept secret so that the land owner won’t know about them. Keeping them secret also keeps them from getting so popular that they draw the attention of the land owner.
There are a few trails in Washington state that have structures. Most structures are small. Most of the trails that have stunts are secret and I don’t know about them. Several places that had stunts last year got torn down.
The big stunt is quite sturdy, but all the rest of the larger ones are really rickety and nailed into trees and generally not nice. Apparently there used to be some really huge long flowing stunts, like singletrack up in the trees in the bit where I help trailbuilding, but they got pulled down a year or two back.
The small stunts in the pictures are much easier to hide and aren’t nailed into trees. Round here, I don’t think anyone uses live wood because there’s so much left around from tree thinning operations, trees falling down etc. that you wouldn’t want to anyway.
They’re quite a laugh, but unless you live in certain bits of Canada, where they’re tolerated, or your trails are really not very good at all, they’re not so amazing to be worth putting up because they usually get pulled down in the end.
Is it just me, or does it seem scarier to try those types of lines on a bike than on a unicycle? With a unicycle. you know where the wheel is at all times. With a bike, it seems like it would get easy to forget and have the back tire just slip off a narrow bridge. Of course, I haven’t ridden a bike in years, so I’m probably just biased…
Just curious. Has there already been a discussion of bikes vs. unis on trails like these?
I’ve found this too. The interesting thing is that I’ve been mountain biking enthusiastically for about 2 years now and unicycling for about 11 months (obviously enthusiastically). For me it’s also the fact that when you fall off a unicycle it’s a lot easier to land on your than when falling from a bike. I’ve told this to heaps of people who’ve called me crazy for doing muni - I find it safer than mountain biking.
I guess everybody knows what I’m talking about; thanks for the great pictures. I also loved the quality building articles. It makes me realize that the ladder bridges here are of quite poor quality. So many ones in the pictures have so much distance, here its all crammed into a tight space that doesn’t really go anywhere. And there are lots of small, thin boards that are really far apart. And so very steep, I can’t get up most of it.
Sorry to drag this thread up from two years ago, but I was wondering if anyone knew about these trails? I live 40 minutes away from Ithaca and would love to ride there.
Dave, I live a few miles from Shindagin Hollow State Forest, which is where those trails are. I have ridden around there on my unicycle, but not on the ladder bridges yet. There is a group of about 10-15 local unicyclists called the finger lakes one wheelers (FLOW), and we get together occassionally to go off-road riding. Check out our website, www.fl1w.org where you can subscribe to our mailing list, or send me a pm.
It would be fun to arrange a group there ride later this summer.
I have always been a two wheel guy, I raced BMX and years ago started freeriding on mtn. bikes. Then last year I wrecked REALLY bad in Moab and had second thoughts about the whole thing. I had been learning to ride a unicycle for a few months when I crashed in UT, and realized that uni was actually safer (and much harder) than what I was doing on two wheels. I’ve had 4 friends break either backs or necks, one in a quadpalegic (sp?), one can almost walk again, and two were lucky and just shook it off after lots of rehab. I have two little girls that need to have a daddy around, they were my biggest determining factor!
But about knowing where your wheels are, you just get used to always allowing for the back wheel to make the turn. Sometimes you grab front brake, endo abit, then move your back wheel to a good spot. A good flowy set of bridges will have extra room on tight curves for both wheels to make it around.
