Gypsy at Northstar Tahoe

29 Apr 2014

By David Scorer

For this week's Tuesday Trail we head to the shores of Lake Tahoe, to Northstar-at-Tahoe Bike Park in the Californian High Sierras. The terrain is gnarly, steep and loose, and as it's usually super dry and very dusty there are plenty of silt bomb holes between the rocks that lie in wait to gobble up your front tire. The Gypsy Trail in particular has taken thought, plenty of hard work, and a desire to iterate and improve on every aspect. The Trail Crew took a meticulous approach to their work, improving the sections that worked and redesigning those that didn’t.

Crew Lead at Northstar Andrew "Sully" Sullivan talks through some of the challenges they faced. Problems with drainage (which must have been at the start of the summer!), the pitch of the trail, meaning that it was actually too fast in some sections, and the fact that in other sections the trail was just missing 'flow'. They tested everything as they went along, and in Andrew's own words, "took the good parts of the trail and reinforced them, and took the not-so-good parts and fixed them!"  And it’s that level of dedication that brings you awesome results like this, with pro-rider Adrienne Schneider going for a spin…

And there's more...!

In Part 2, the crew finish building the new GoPro feature and fully redesign the lower part of the Gypsy trail. This includes an epic wooden feature that has several line options, and a rock section where each stone was hand-placed in position! The first time we've had 2 separate videos to profile the same trail on Tuesday Trails, as Adrienne continues the testing...

Comments