Trail services

When trails are designed and constructed correctly they require a minimal amount of maintenance in the long run. When a trail is poorly designed — excessive grades, no rolling dips to shed water — it costs more to maintain every single year, even if it was built well.

Our crews are trained to use sustainable design principles: keep average trail grade to 8% or less in most soils, align the trail with the natural topography in a rolling contoured design, and make sure water exits the tread often. Trails in flat areas have inherent drainage problems and are either avoided or built with special techniques.

We have turned down trail projects because they simply were not sustainable and we were not comfortable being involved with a trail that would inevitably become a maintenance nightmare.

• Field flagging and staked alignment
• Grade and drainage design
• Reroutes of failing trail sections
• Rolling grade dips as the standard drainage feature

Numerous agencies continue to invest significant amounts of labor and money into trails that are not sustainable. Often the sections causing the most problems can be rerouted to sustainable grades in less time than it takes to fix them on an annual basis.

On the Fern Creek and Lost Trail Creek trails near Creede we widened and out-sloped tread, blasted and removed boulders, widened switchback turns and built substantial grade dips for safety and erosion control — over 11 miles of OHV-accessible trail across two seasons.

• Reroutes of unsustainable alignments
• Tread widening and out-sloping
• Rock work, boulder removal and switchback rebuilds
• Grade dips retro-fitted for erosion control

Arrowhead Trails has developed trail maintenance plans for agencies, organizations and landowners. The plans include engineering stake logs with corresponding photographs and GIS-generated maps, so clients can easily understand what is needed and how to budget appropriately to implement it.

These plans often contain hourly estimates for implementing tasks with staff and volunteers, as well as line items for implementing the same tasks with a trail contractor. Trail specifications are included so the plan can be adapted straight into a public bidding process.

• Engineering stake logs with geo-referenced field photos
• GIS maps organised geographically
• Hourly estimates for staff, volunteers or contractors
• Specifications formatted for public bidding

Our experience training and supervising volunteers and staff is extensive. Arrowhead crews have developed sustainable trail building and maintenance programs that are then run by volunteers and park staff. Programs like the Boulder Regional Conservation Crewleader Program, developed in 1993, have trained hundreds of volunteers to assist agencies with their trail management needs.

On National Trails Day projects, Arrowhead staff have trained and supervised over 500 volunteers for more than 2,500 hours of new trail construction. Almost four miles of new trail were built on those projects and no injuries occurred — except blisters and sore muscles.

• One-day workshops or week-long professional intensives
• Project planning, trail logs, tool use and safety
• Construction specifications and techniques
• Volunteer and crew management, mechanized construction

Arrowhead has built pump tracks for the Town of Salida, the Town of Breckenridge, The Link School in Buena Vista and a number of private clients. The Salida town track was planned with the Salida Mountain Trails organization and opened with a beginner loop, an intermediate loop and an advanced loop.

One intermediate backyard track runs over an eighth of a mile and contains two 180-degree berms, seven 90-degree berms, five half-berms and over forty rollers. On that project we opted out of buying and importing dirt and instead dug the track into the ground with a mini-excavator.

• Beginner through advanced loops
• Berms, rollers, dirt jump lines, skinnies and ladders
• Native-material construction where the site allows
• Public parks, schools and private property