Nice work fellas!
I rode both loops last week on the CX bike... just curious why the corridors where cut sooo wide? It's like an open field in a few place on the beginner loop...
I can't speak for Nick and the crew, but in my experience wide brush corridors are the right way to go for several reasons.
One is the line of sight for the rider is more important than you would think. It's surprising how far ahead you need to look to keep up a reasonable amount of speed on a bike.
A more immediate reason is it's hard to clear out brush from a narrow corridor. When you're dragging cut brush, it catches on everything. If that includes a lot of standing brush, the debris isn't going anywhere without using a tractor and chain to drag it.
A narrow corridor is difficult to keep clear. Sticks and branches are constantly raining down from the surrounding trees, and over the years they form a wall next to the trail that makes clearing debris progressively more difficult.
The actual path that results from trail building, that ~15" wide dirt ribbon, is never exactly what the people building it had in mind. It's kind of a statistical average of where people decided to ride inside of the available cleared path. It helps everyone to make the initial cut into the dirt a bit wide so this averaging process can run it's course.
The rest of the cleared corridor grows back in gradually and results in the kind of trail we're used to seeing.
Walt
