Tag Archives: skinnies

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 

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

Chain saw crew adds two advanced-level skinnies to the Sechler Pk trail

I spotted this log along the Sechler Park river bottoms MTB trail last fall, thinking it would make a great skinny. After some discussion with CROCT president and trail steward Marty Larson, we decided it would be best to make it an intermediate-level skinny by shaving it flat like the log on the right that was recently created at MORC’s Elm Creek Trail:

Sechler log - fall Sechler log - fall Elm Creek skinny

So we organized a small trail work crew today, including two guys with the best electric chainsaw 2017 has to offer: Bill Nelson and Dave Nygren. Unfortunately, after they sliced the end off the log, we discovered that it was starting to rot. So it didn’t make sense to put all the work into slicing it flat for an intermediate-level skinny. So instead, they scored the top of it to make it an advanced level skinny. Likewise, a narrow log skinny next to it:

rotting Sechler Park log Dave Nygren Bill Nelson
Dave Nygren, Dave Berglund, Marty Larson, Bill Nelson Bill Nelson, Marty Larson, Dave Nygren Dave Nygren, Bill Nelson, Marty Larson
We still have to construct a ramp of sorts to make it easier to get up onto the bigger skinny.  We have the log pieces ready but the ice and frozen dirt prevented us from making it stable.
In the meantime, we’ll be looking for another log that would be a good candidate for a beginner/intermediate-level skinny.