Tag Archives: logovers

Cannon River Tree Care brings logs for Sechler skills park. Skinnies reconfigured.

We began reworking the Sechler skills park beam skinny a couple weeks ago (blog post here). In the past week, our friends Matt and Jon Feldman at Cannon River Tree Care went out of their way to drop some logs at the gate to the skills park. So CROCT Dirt Boss/El Presidente Marty Larson and I used one of them with the available beams to reconfigure an intermediate-to-advanced-level beam/log/beam combination skinny:

Towing logs into the Sechler skills park

Marty Larson, configuring the beam/log skinny in the Sechler skills park

A few days later, CROCT uber-volunteer Bill Nelson put a fresh chain on his chainsaw and flattened the pine log between the beams. The skinny can be ridden either direction but it’s designed to be a progressively harder challenge when riding it south/towards the ball fields:

Bill Nelson flattening a log in the Sechler skills park

Bill Nelson flattening a log in the Sechler skills park

Josh Seifert on the Sechler skills park beam/log skinny

We’ve temporarily rolled the other logs together into a sizable logover. With the addition of a short beam at one end, the pile also provides a difficult skinny challenge:

Josh Seifert riding the Sechler skills park logover skinny

CROCT member Josh Seifert shows how to do it all in this short video:

The skinnies and logovers on CROCT’s Sechler Park trail are ready to ride

We’re a long way from some of the technical-rich MORC trails systems in the Twin Cities metro, but we’ve been gradually adding optional technical features to our Sechler Park trail in Northfield to keep things interesting for more advanced mountain bikers.

With the spring thaw, the two skinnies created by a chainsaw work crew in late January in the area of the Sechler trail  some are calling The Playground are now ready to ride.  They’re advanced-level skinnies, not because they’re high but because we haven’t flattened them. They’re both in the early stages of rotting so we opted to just lightly score them, hoping we can get a season or two of use out of them.

The larger of the two skinnies now has a ramp to make it easier to get up onto the log. The other end of the log splits into two branches. You can drop off the log in between them or try your luck on the narrow branches and finish with a wheelie drop off the ends.

Sechler skinny Sechler skinny

The other skinny is a bit tougher not only because it’s smaller and tapers to very small but it’s also bouncy:

Sechler skinny

We have designs on a third advanced-level skinny nearby, one of three still-living trees that toppled over together towards the river. It’s almost ready to ride. We just need to figure out the entrance. Until then, just pick up your bike, place it on the log, and go:

Sechler skinny Sechler skinny Sechler skinny

Also available on other parts of the trail are two logovers that have different levels of challenge depending on where you choose to ride over them:

Sechler logover Sechler logover