Whistler Bike Park: Dirt - Park Report

Dirt is neither good nor evil, it’s just dirt. Not all dirt however, is created equal, there is good dirt and bad dirt when talking in relative bike terms. For example, good dirt has a mix of sand and clay in perfect proportions that allow it to be shaped into pleasing bike features while remaining tacky and draining water at a rapid rate. Too much sand and it crumbles and won’t hold together, too much clay and it gets mad slippery when wet and takes forever to dry out. This perfect ratio is roughly 70% sand with 30% clay, a formula that sounds great in pixels but is often hard to find in real life. The perfect mix can be made mechanically by mixing the two substrates to form sifted piles of trail building gold, but that is an expensive proposition when looking at trucking and importing to trails to make the ultimate riding surface. What happens in real life is more like digging up whatever exists under in the terrain where you plan to put a trail and dealing with it as it comes. This is the case in the Whistler Mountain Bike Park, where we have zones of perfection (Dirt Merchant) and zones of glacial till that are compressed into bands of greasy grey clay.


The new section of trail we are calling "C-More” which rolls off the tongue a little faster than Crank it Up More, bisects a zone which is like a giant dirt Oreo with perfect cookie brown sand / clay sandwiching a creamy filling of soft (read too soft!) grey glacial clay. The hold up for opening the new trail has been the drying process through this band of juicy glop which would have required 80 sheets of plywood to bridge between the good dirt on either side. Once it dries out it will be kiln hardened but it seems to be taking its sweet time. As conditions allow, we will be opening this new offering so keep an eye on the message board this week as we hope it will weather whatever precip we see before the weekend.



This weekend also marks the beginning of 7 days per week of extended play, with Bike Park hours from 10am to 8pm daily. Hope you can make it out for a rip, see you on C-More.

- Brian Finestone

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MENTIONS: @WhistlerMountainBikePark

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