Guisborough December Dig

Today’s dig saw us heading back up to Les’1 to try and make a little more progress. With a small team of 4 we decided to work from the bottom up, since pushing the wheelbarrow up the muddy bank is challenging at the best of times. The surface was rather slippy today, after a few days of frost has thawed out. We firstly decided to scrape the slop off the bottom berm and get some armor down on that. We put down a nice thick layer which will hopefully hold up.

Bottom berm

Bottom berm

Ghille Kettle in action

Ghille Kettle in action

We also managed to make use of the Ghille Kettle this morning too. It really is a great piece of kit for making a nice hot brew on the trail side.

So post brew we continued to work up the trail. I wanted to get rider coming into the berm on the ‘correct’ side. Its a left hander, so ideally you need to enter on the right of the trail for the best flow. However due to the condition of the trail a lot of riders are being forced over to the left, and then having to cut across the entry of the berm. This has caused the bankside to erode and dragged lots of soft ground into the berm, which was holding water and making a real mess. So with that in mind we have put in an armored line from the centre of the trail back across to the right, to give a better entry into the berm.

Looking up

Looking up

Looking down

Looking down

There’s obviously still a bit of work to do in order to link up with the work we have done further up the trail, but we will get there eventually.

Many thanks to today’s volunteers, Gary, Dan, and Tim.