Happy Day!  The Woolly Trails are OPEN as of today!  Get some!

It’s the day dirt & single track lovers have waited for for months – that’s right, the Woolly Trails are OPEN as of today!  

Thank you all for staying off of the trails during the their most vulnerable & delicate time – during & after the Spring thaw.  Your staying off the trails ensures that the trails are in great shape throughout the season and saves volunteers dozens of hours of work.  

So, come to town this weekend for the Mammoth Gravel Classic, stay & play in the amazing St. Croix River Valley, and ride Woolly on Sunday!

On a different note, soil scientist, cyclist, and great friend of Woolly Joshua Stamper (who is doing a presentation on the Gravel Conspiracy at Cyclova XC to kick off the Mammoth Gravel Classic weekend on Friday night) just posted this interesting blurb on the science behind rideable singletrack on Facebook.  I thought you’d all be interested in this bit of “dirt science”:
Image courtesy of Joshua Stamper

From Joshua Stamper:  “To those of you who might wonder what causes mountain bike trails to dry out and become trafficable, I offer the data capture graph from the last month of soil moisture monitoring at Elm Creek.

The red circle indicates soil temperature at 3 inch depth, and the green circle indicates the steep decline in matric potential (ie soil moisture). This is in-spite of the fact that we also had a half inch of precip over the weekend. As soils warm, plant uptake and evaporation of water from the soil increases, drying out the soil. This cummulative effect is referred to as evapotranspiration, and it describes how plants use water from the soil.”

Categories: mammoth

Leave a Reply