Building a Berm for Bikers

Lugging rocks and shoveling dirt to improve a trail is hard work. Kyaiera Mistretta-Tucker calls it the “1800s New England Farm Workout.”

Mistretta-Tucker is a member of the Trumbull Trails Coalition (TTC). Last weekend, the group of mountain bikers met at Pequonnock River Valley Park for a trail work session.

For TTC founder Rich Coffey, mountain biking in the Valley was at first just a fun way to spend time with his son. He said that once he started, he “fell in love with the park.”

Since 2010, Coffey has been leading his group of volunteers into the Valley for scheduled trail maintenance sessions. Their objective is to construct sustainable trail additions so that all park users—the mountain bikers, the hikers, and even the dog walkers—can better enjoy the trail.

The coalition, which all trail users may join, is a partnership with the Fairfield County chapter of CT NEMBA, or the Connecticut branch of the New England Mountain Bike Association.

The mountain bikers of FC NEMBA meet at different parks all over the area for group rides and monthly trail building sessions, like this one in the Valley working with the TTC.

Mistretta-Tucker, a mountain biker who was there with her husband Ryan, the president of FC NEMBA, said she enjoys helping out not only because she is improving the trails for herself and for others, but because the work in itself is very satisfying.

With most work that people do on a day-to-day basis, she said, “we don’t see a tangible result when it’s finished.”

But with this kind of task, “even if you only work on three feet of trail, you can come back at the end of the day and, as long as no one messed with it, you can say, ‘This is my three feet.’”

On this outing, the Trumbull Trails Coalition built a berm, or embankment, to help direct riders away from a trail the group had rerouted in July due to poor drainage.

To construct trail additions like this embankment, the group uses the latest sustainable trail building and design techniques, making changes that will combat erosion while causing a minimum of environmental disruption.

First, four people transported large rocks using a homemade rock crib, which is a sheet of durable netting strung between two poles. Other volunteers used hoes, pickaxes, and shovels to dig up mineral soil to cover this foundation of rocks.

“We’re actually using Roman-era construction techniques,” said FC NEMBA president Ryan Tucker.

Coffey said another important goal of sustainable trail building is facilitating “trail flow,” which is a name for the unique sense a mountain biker gets when he is riding fluidly along a trail’s contours.

However, Coffey said, some riders will disobey the trail’s mandates and reposition obstacles or create their own trails; this can undermine the purpose of the volunteers’ work, which is to make the trail the best it can be for these riders and other users.

“We are trying to make it so when we do reroute a trail, mountain bikers consider it fun, if not more fun, than before,” said Coffey.

Riders come from all over Connecticut to ride Trumbull’s Valley. This refurbished trail will be no exception.

Later that day, Coffey tried out the new and improved trail with Steve McAllister, another TTC member, and confirmed that it was, indeed, “a blast” to ride.

FC NEMBA’s next trail building session will take place on Oct. 15 at Huntington State Park in Bethel. Check out www.fcnemba.org for information about this group. Visit www.vizettes.com/ttc for information about the Trumbull Trails Coalition.