undefined | Better HN

0 pointssecretsinger5y ago0 comments

In South Africa, we have pretty harsh lockdown laws, including only being able to exercise within 5km of your house and only between 6am and 9am.

I'm a keen mountain biker, so I've put my energy and frustration into developing new mountain bike trails in the hills around my house. Been meaning to do this for a long time, but there are such good trails a few miles further away, so the incentive has not been very strong until now.

I'm building for about 1 hour per day on average, and I manage to get between 10 and 100m of trail built in that hour, so by the time the lock-down ends I'm aiming to have a contiguous piece of singletrack that's a mile long.

Also, I've been helping on a local project to develop an open-source ventilator (https://www.backabuddy.co.za/champion/project/rescuevent)

And I'm working on a peer-to-peer donation platform (which is not really ready to show to anyone yet)

0 comments

kingbirdy5y ago

Creating a new trail sounds interesting - I had to do similar as part of a service project when I was a kid, but I imagine it's much more fulfilling when it's for your personal use. How are you able to create the trail, is it free use public land, or more of a guerrilla repurposing of untended private land?

secretsingerOP5y ago

The land is in limbo: it's abandoned pine plantations currently being used by joggers, dogwalkers and (to a lesser degree) cyclists.

I can highly recommend trail building (both walking and cycling trails) as a combination of physical, aesthetic and intellectual challenges (figuring out how to use the terrain to be both fun and interesting/possible to ride and then moving tons of earth and vegetation to make it happen).

1 more reply

cdaringe5y ago

My favorite project in this thread. Great work.

grandinj5y ago

fellow saffer here, good for you!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse