Hi folks!
hope this is no repost but I'm no native English speaker so can't figure out the right search terms appeareantely.
Anyway, here's the deal: we've been digging around in the woods in my backyard; we have some small jumps and 2 larger ones, together with some curves; water flows where it should flow, ie out of the way of the riding areas. All basic starter stuff, at least for now.
Very much fun to ride it, at least when the dirt gets dry.
Last week there where up to 4 days without rain, temperature of about 10degrees celcius during the day, yet we're stuck with a nasty problem: the dirt right in front of the kickers doesn't seem to want to get dry; it looks dry, but in fact it's some sticky kind of mud: riding it pushes aside the dirt leaving you with a 'trace' of 5cm deep. If we don't repair that before the next rain, water stays in; in fact, not repairing it just feels weird because riding anywhere near it automatically makes your wheels slip into it.
Problem occurs at all jumps except one, yet we didn't do anything different to build that one. The dirt in the area ranges from dark brown (upper 20cm layer) to more yellowish (everything beneath); we think it has a lot of clay in it because it's pretty sticky in general.
Now, we're not really sure what to do about it, if anything can be done, so my thought was to ask around on the vast internet ;-].
Possible causes/solutions we came up with:
- water is definately the cause, but that doesn't explain while it affects only a part of the launch, and not the rest of the trail..
- we built almost everything on top of existing paths; so the ground is very hard there; is it possible that water drains through the dirt, to end up on the path, where it can't go further, so then just leaves the jump at the kicker?
- dig away a part of the kicker, fill it again with other dirt
- make pathway in front of the jumps a lot higher than the surroundings
- is this normal and should we just be more patient? (bweirk)
Any reactions are welcome!!
hope this is no repost but I'm no native English speaker so can't figure out the right search terms appeareantely.
Anyway, here's the deal: we've been digging around in the woods in my backyard; we have some small jumps and 2 larger ones, together with some curves; water flows where it should flow, ie out of the way of the riding areas. All basic starter stuff, at least for now.
Very much fun to ride it, at least when the dirt gets dry.
Last week there where up to 4 days without rain, temperature of about 10degrees celcius during the day, yet we're stuck with a nasty problem: the dirt right in front of the kickers doesn't seem to want to get dry; it looks dry, but in fact it's some sticky kind of mud: riding it pushes aside the dirt leaving you with a 'trace' of 5cm deep. If we don't repair that before the next rain, water stays in; in fact, not repairing it just feels weird because riding anywhere near it automatically makes your wheels slip into it.
Problem occurs at all jumps except one, yet we didn't do anything different to build that one. The dirt in the area ranges from dark brown (upper 20cm layer) to more yellowish (everything beneath); we think it has a lot of clay in it because it's pretty sticky in general.
Now, we're not really sure what to do about it, if anything can be done, so my thought was to ask around on the vast internet ;-].
Possible causes/solutions we came up with:
- water is definately the cause, but that doesn't explain while it affects only a part of the launch, and not the rest of the trail..
- we built almost everything on top of existing paths; so the ground is very hard there; is it possible that water drains through the dirt, to end up on the path, where it can't go further, so then just leaves the jump at the kicker?
- dig away a part of the kicker, fill it again with other dirt
- make pathway in front of the jumps a lot higher than the surroundings
- is this normal and should we just be more patient? (bweirk)
Any reactions are welcome!!