The Saga of Allegrippis

By Frank Maguire

So how long will you wait for trails? Tough question, but it’s becoming more and more a fact that good things come to mountain bikers who can wait. The new Allegrippis Trails system at the Raystown Lake Army Corps Project is a great case study in patience. When IMBA signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Army Corps in 2002, mountain bike advocacy was still in its gawky teenage years.

By 2009, when the ribbon on the trails was cut, advocacy had moved forward by learning from the successes and building towards the future. For certain, there are some other big projects moving through the proper channels, but Raystown is the largest of the original areas of focus in the MOU to be completed. IMBA has been able to build incredible trails because of the planning and patience learned in the last twenty years of mountain bike advocacy.

At any point, someone could have done a "rake and ride" trail system that would have taken seven days to build, not seven years. But beyond the person who scratched them in, would anyone have cared? While they were walking around with their rake and loppers, would they have been able to avoid the siren song of old roads and game trails that looked OK, but wouldn’t have held up under more than 20 wheelsets a year? Would they have known that "sustainable" actually equals "more fun"?

At Raystown, IMBA was presented a blank canvas to create what would become a unique ride destination. Suffice it to say that it has been a long road to get to a place where between 300 and 400 mountain bikers from around the mid-Atlantic could show up this May, after a week solid of rain, and ride 30-plus miles of built-to-last trail.

Although many of the lessons learned at Raystown can transfer to other areas, there were neither existing trails nor any local mountain bike community to begin with. This was both a positive and a negative, as the lack of a local club severely hindered recruiting volunteers throughout the process. However, there was also no one who claimed ownership of trails—who liked them just the way they were. The lack of trails on the ground allowed a master plan for the trails, following the idea of a stacked loop system to be implemented.

If you haven’t heard the term before, the stacked loop system places the easier, more approachable trails closer to the trailhead, and more difficult trails in concentric circles off this intro loop, allowing for progressive riding challenges and multiple ride options. Often when people hear that there are 32 miles of trails at Raystown, they assume that means they will ride 32 miles and cover everything, but the loops would actual require between 45 and 50 miles to cover all the options.

Making it happen

So what are the lessons from Raystown that are repeatable in your own backyard? To make trail projects like this happen, there usually needs to be two crucial ingredients: local buy-in and the insider. Local buy-in doesn’t just mean a club that can volunteer for trail work, but a mountain bike community that understands that trail-building is a process, that it will take a while, and that there will be setbacks.

The insider needs to be someone within the land management agency who takes ownership of the project. The interesting aspect of this insider is that they don’t need to be a mountain biker, just someone who is willing to continue to move the process forward. Basically, they just need to get it.

At Raystown, the local buy-in was actually several different people acting at different levels over many years. It’s often hard to take such a long view, particularly in central Pennsylvania where we already have close to a million acres of state public land that often turned a blind eye to mountain bike trails. Originally, there was a local environmental engineer, Shannon Dolte, who had laid the groundwork, doing the initial environmental assessment and putting the Army Corps of Engineers’ fears to rest about turning bikes loose.

There was also a GIS specialist, Clark Fisher, who had been working on road cycling routes for the regional economic development commission, an organization that conveniently shared their office with the Army Corps. As the IMBA state representative, I got involved with the project in the winter of 2002-2003; Raystown was a place 45 minutes from my house, but I had never been there.

The really heavy lifting in the final year fell to Evan Gross, who not only heads up the brand new local mountain bike club (Raystown Mountain Bike Association), but has put in hundreds of volunteer hours in less than 12 months and has the MacGyver skills to prime a keg with a bike pump.

Working with land managers when you have an insider is like traveling in a foreign country with a quality interpreter and guide. You may get frustrated with the pace of things and insult some local custom, but the insider makes sure that you don’t end up needing to bribe your way out of jail. At Raystown, there were actually two insiders. Deb Prosser, the director of business development for the Southern Alleghenies Development Commission, became the facilitator, making sure that the bureaucracy always moved, even if glacially.

At the same time, Allen Gwinn was the ranger who was tasked with coordinating the project within the Corps. Allen often would seem to dampen down our enthusiasm with doses of reality, and then show up on his day off to deliver tools and beer to our volunteer days.

Choosing the design

When considering the design for Raystown, we understood from day one that these trails were going to be a destination place. Central PA is not lacking in public lands, so there needed to be something a little more going on to make people want to come. In the first meeting with the Huntingdon County Visitor’s Bureau, Rich Edwards, a Trails Specialist with IMBA Trail Solutions, made the statement that at a minimum 25 miles of trail were needed, and that 30 would be better. The math came from the fact that the target audience was at least three hours away.

The system was going to need to be large enough to warrant a second day of riding. The trails would also need to be well-marked and laid out in an easy-to-understand manner, as visitors wouldn’t have the accumulated knowledge of riding familiar territory to rely on. In many ways, first impressions were going to be the make-or-break for the trails.

Another question that came up about Raystown was, "Where are all the rocks?" Central PA trails are known for being rocky, but that is mostly because the public lands are on the ridges, where agriculture is impossible. The western shore of Raystown Lake, as former agricultural land that was ceded as part of the dam project, actually still has significant amounts of dirt. Underneath, however, is a stratum of crumbly shale that allows the land to drain well. In many ways these conditions allowed us to build in the ideal situation: the land had great contours (it’s difficult to build machine trails unless you have 20 percent-plus side slope) and very few areas that would require a lot of volunteer hand labor.

For people who are used to riding legacy trails (trails that were built with other uses besides mountain bikes in mind), the idea of machine-built trails can be difficult to comprehend and seem akin to blasphemy. In the hands of a skilled operator, though, mini bulldozers and excavators can produce trails that will rival anything that can be done by hand in a much shorter time.

As a comparison, to achieve full bench-cut trail construction with volunteers, it’s reasonable to expect six feet an hour by hand. So the 32 miles of trails at Raystown would have required over 28,000 man-hours just moving dirt. By using machines, the number of volunteer hours was reduced to a tenth of that. Machines also make it much easier to take the harder route, rather than using an existing road grade or game trail because it’s already there.

But the real big advantage to machines is that they will put grade reversals and turns exactly where they are needed. Machines also make sure that the proper grade and drainage is achieved, and then the trail tread is allowed to develop through use. In just a few short years, the trail will be a continuous 12 to 18-inch ribbon. What has been avoided by this build method is having the trail drift off the graded portion and creating multiple lines because something about the layout wasn’t quite right.

Coming together

So was it all worth the time and the effort? Was seven years too long to wait for trails? The week prior to the grand opening, there were at least two events cancelled in the mid-Atlantic region because of the seven to 10 inches of rain that had fallen in the ten days previous. The only wet spots on the Allegrippis Trail were the sections where we had not been able to armor spring seeps, creating probably less than 100 yards of mud over 32 miles.

But more important was the comment I heard throughout the weekend, "I couldn’t stop giggling." With the ride quality described as twisting and turning, carving and weaving, the trails were compared to everything from a roller coaster, to a BMX park to an all-day pump track. If more smiles per mile makes the trail, I would say that waiting for Raystown was time well spent.