Tag Archives: skills park

Josh & Jayden Seifert lead the upgrade to CROCT’s Sechler skills park

CROCT member Josh Seifert has redesigned and led a major redevelopment of the skills area in Sechler Park this fall, adding 3 table top jumps, a large wooden berm dubbed Bermzilla, a stockade berm, and several rollers:

Sechler skills park redesign sketch - Josh Seifert Josh Seifert CROCT volunteers - Sechler skills park

His son Jayden has been working at his side much of the time:

Jayden Seifert Jayden Seifert Josh & Jayden Seifert

Josh & Jayden Seifert Josh & Jayden Seifert Josh & Jayden Seifert

As we were about to reopen the park, major flooding of the Cannon River in late September did some damage:

flood-damaged Sechler skills park flood-damaged Sechler skills park flood-damaged Sechler skills park

While waiting for the water to recede, Josh and Jayden spent Saturday Oct 3 at the Lebanon Hills MTB park in Eagan for Dakota County’s Wild Mountain Festival and IMBA’s Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day.

Dakota County's Wild Mountain Festival at Lebanon Hills MTB Park

Like last year, Jayden won the race for his age group. Like other parents, his dad had to race on Jayden’s bike:

Jayden Seifert Jayden Seifert

Jayden Seifert Josh Seifert

Josh and a small team of volunteers did the repairs to the Sechler skills park yesterday:

repairs to Sechler skills park repairs to Sechler skills park

repaired Sechler skills park repaired Sechler skills park

We hope to open later this week, as soon as the dirt hardens.

CROCT’s Sechler skills park is getting an upgrade

More details to come when it’s open but here are two Tweets:

Bill Nelson’s Ford tractor helps to transform the Sechler skills park

Last week, CROCT member and uber volunteer Bill Nelson drove his Ford Tractor back home. It had been on duty for the past couple of months in the Sechler skills park. 13-second video:

Bill originally brought his tractor to the skills park to sculpt dirt into a beginner table top jump:

Bill Nelson, Ford tractor

Bill Nelson, Ford tractor

I soon discovered it could do other things, like move logs and boulders. I put Bill to work:

Bill Nelson, Ford tractor

Bill eventually got sick of me bossing him and his tractor around so he gave me a few operator lessons:

Griff Wigley, Ford tractor

I teamed up with CROCT member Jason Decoux from Faribault to fashion the table top:

Jason Decoux

Jason Decoux

I eventually began to see how the tractor could expand the possibilities for more features in the skills park:

I got better at sculpting with it:

By late fall, I graduated summa cum laude from the Mountain Bike Skills Park Tractor Operators Academy. Thanks to Mr. Bill for the mentoring, the keys, and the hat:

Griff Wigley, Bill Nelson, Ford Tractor guys

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:

Skills park changes in Sechler: teeter totter, dirt pile, and skinnies

We now have a small teeter totter in the Sechler skills park area, approved by the City of Northfield. Props to Jim Wellbrock and fellow volunteers for making it happen:

Galen Murray riding the mtb teeter totter in Sechler Park Jim Wellbrock with mtb teeter totter

We put it to use during Monday night’s youth group ride with great success:

Michael Lehmkuhl watching over the Sechler MTB skills park teeter totter

The nearby dirt pile (used for the baseball fields) now has 5 ‘lines’ on it, providing 5 levels of difficulty for riding over it:

Sechler MTB skills park dirt pile

After watching the problems that some of our Monday night series youth have had on the beam skinny, we’ve started work on reconfiguring it. We don’t have it all worked out but in the interim, there’s now just a single line of 3 beams. We’ve piled the rest of them on the river side of the trail.

Sechler MTB skills park skinny