We began the month by meeting with Davin Cox, one of our first trail school students, to check out some family property in Marble Falls (northwest of Austin. Some folks there hope to create public, multi-use trails. The land features interesting topography and shares a border with Longhorn Caverns State Park, creating opportunities for cavers as well as bicyclists. Davin and his relatives are very interested in creating another mountain bike ranch along the lines of Bluff Creek or Rocky Hill, so we look forward to working with them on its development.

Lake Georgetown
Here we visited one of the Army Corps of Engineers’ properties, and taught a trail school hosted by our friend and fellow IMBA state representative Dewayne Buratti. Dewayne has done a great job of organizing volunteer labor to help create some technically challenging trails -- and has done a tremendous amount of work himself. Although rideable, the trails still need additional work. Give Dewayne a call at 512-797-7433 if you’d like to earn Paydirt hours, or just want to help out.

NORBA Nationals, Waco (March 11-14)
From Marble Falls, we pointed the Subaru towards Waco to rub shoulders with the bigwigs at the NORBA Nationals, held in Cameron Park. It was very exciting to meet Gary Fisher, Dave Wiens, Alison Dunlap, Jeremiah Bishop, Mark Weir, and others who have done so much to advance the sport of mountain bike riding and racing. We shared booth space with our co-workers from TBC, and parked our Subarus to achieve maximum visibility among the spectators. We even got our picture taken by the photographer from Mountain Bike Magazine, who praised our program. Hopefully we’ll wind up in MBM’s pages before too long.

Lake Tawakoni State Park, east of Dallas
We visited Lake Tawakoni at the request of park manager Ken “Doc” Watson, who had attended our state park trail school in Tyler back in February. Ken wanted us to assess the feasibility of extending Lake Tawakoni’s current hiking trail and creating new bike trails. He had already flagged a proposed corridor, and after noticing that he had successfully integrated the techniques he learned in our class, we recommended only a few minor corrections. We look forward to working with Ken and DORBA to build the trail system once the resource review is complete.

DORBA Trail School, Lake Grapevine
During this trail school -- facilitated by Cindy Bradley and “Turbo” (a.k.a. Ed) – we worked on the Northshore trail system, located on Army Corps of Engineers property at Lake Grapevine. We had a very productive couple of days, and fixed several low spots that had become huge mud puddles.

Houston/Leakey
Before heading to Leakey to work on the Hill Country Youth Ranch’s new property, we visited Houston to attend the wedding of our friends, Caren and Stuart. The ceremony was just beautiful. At the Youth Ranch, we taught a trail school to a group of AmeriCorps members. These kids were great -- they were very motivated and energetic, and just soaked up the knowledge.

STORM Trail School, San Antonio
We barely had time to catch our breath before going to San Antonio to teach this trail school, organized by Sandy DeLeon. After delivering our workshop in a conference room at the police station, we attended a barbecue lunch/STORM fundraiser before going off to work at O.P. Schnabel Park.

Bonham
Here we wrapped up the month by doing some consultation in the Caddo National Grasslands, where we hope to build trail in the near future. Grasslands is a misleading term: There’s actually acres and acres of beautiful forest right on the Red River next to Oklahoma, so we’re pretty excited about those prospects.

As you can see, March was a pretty busy month, and April promises to be the same. We start out at the Bar H race in St. Jo, and then head out to El Paso for two weeks. Talk to you next month!

Signed,
Susan and Ryan

Next up on our itinerary: Frisco and Dallas area for our first trail clinic.