If you were there, you won’t forget it any time soon. The 2019 edition of the Bell’s Iceman Cometh Challenge was a mud bath. If you thought the race was tough, you should have seen the clean-up.
It’s been a bit of a trend for the past few editions of the nation’s biggest one-day, point-to-point mountain bike race. All week long, it rains. Friday, just the day before five thousands racers tear from Kalkaska to Traverse City, it’s simply gorgeous. And then on Saturday, it rains overnight.
For most of the past five or six editions, that rain has let up in the hours before the start. What’s left is usually almost ceremonial; just enough mud to dirty-up the jerseys and bikes for the cameras, but nothing that really affects the race. For the 30th edition of the race, however, it didn’t rain. It snowed. It snowed five or six inches in some spots on the course, all piling up on top of saturated ground from rain all week long that didn’t have a chance to dry up under the relatively sunny skies of Friday.
Havoc rained. The course was torn to shreds, in spite of the physical and ferocious protestations of trail volunteers. Even as the riders rode through, Tom White, a Northern Michigan Mountain Biking Association trail director, was down to short sleeves as he desperately tried to keep one of two sections of newer singletrack rideable. It was a noble effort, one that came after spending seven hours marking the course and then inspecting in throughout the night.
It was in vain.
The next weekend saw another round of snow, putting the course under several more inches of snow. A few brief warm spells in December allowed for some inspection, but no real chance to fix a course that had blown to bits. Six-inch singletrack was now six feet wide. Like rivulets streaming along a creekbed, riders had simply abandoned the trail and opened up new singletracks that paralleled the actual course. Corners turned into mud bogs. Descents, where riders had squealed down with both brakes clenched, were often a foot deep.
Finally, as the snow disappeared, we were able to get out into the woods and fix the sections most harmed by bad luck and bad conditions. Using a mix of tools, we spent plenty of time digging, cutting, and shaping a new trail out of the ashes of the old. We quickly determined that switching between different implements slowed down progress, and having trail crews dedicated to certain sections, rather than having one person tackle a certain stretch, slowed things down even more.
Out of the muddy morass of the Iceman Cometh Challenge, the Trail Loamer was born. A single implement to cut, shovel, and rake to make each volunteer more productive and more versatile. For a repair job like Iceman, it was perfect, as we soon found out as we finished things up in the spring. We know that many trail associations across the country face trail damage during freeze and thaw cycles that are identical to what we faced this past fall and winter, and this is going to be a great product for them.
You can check out the Loamer, dimensions, and availability right here.