Mann is a member of the Cronies Trail Building Crew, a group of local bicycle riders volunteering their time to build a system of singletrack mountain bike trails in the park. The group has built about four miles of trail so far and would eventually like to have 10.
Five years ago, Mann and other members of the Cronies Outdoor Adventure Tribe (COAT) – a bike club sponsored by Cronies Cafe and Restaurant in downtown Waupaca – and state park staff “developed a turnkey operation to eventually allow the Cronies club to come in here,” said Mann, a COAT member. “There was a lot of paperwork and the land we were going to utilize had to be determined as well.”
Then in April 2006 the park hosted a trail-building school taught by International Mountain Bicycling Association staff. “Probably close to 100 people showed up, not only from Wisconsin, but Minnesota and the UP. That’s when we started construction out here,” Mann said. “There was classroom time and field time. In three days, I think we built almost a half mile of trail.”
After the crowd left, productivity came to a standstill for awhile. “But four or five people,” Mann said, himself included, “grabbed the ball and ran with it.”
The closest singletrack mountain biking system to Hartman Creek and Waupaca is at Standing Rocks, a Portage County park 20 miles away with more than 14 miles of challenging trails. “It’s a great trail system. I love it, but it’s geared toward the more advanced rider,” Mann said. “We’ll provide easy, intermediate and advanced trails. We’re allowing a biker to grow as they bike deeper into the trail system.”
Furthermore, he said, “We live here and we want to provide the opportunity locally.”
Campers pitch in
Mann was back out on the trail on Thursday, July 2, with a group of Onaway Adventure Camp youths and their leaders. Stephanie Monroe, a volunteer leader with Onaway Adventure Camp, spent a week with more than 40 campers in the park’s group campground. After a two-mile hike to the work site, 10 young people helped build trail as part of a service project.
Park officials have allowed construction of the singletrack in the southwest corner of the park. “That’s what we’re confined to, but there’s a lot of land out here. I think there’s close to 100 acres that we’re able to build on,” Mann said.
The process is slow as the builders deal with heat and insects. “We’ve determined that one person can only construct 20 feet of trail in one hour,” Mann said. “That’s the average depending on vegetation. Sometimes it’s a little more, sometimes it’s a little less.”
He said extending the trail starts with somebody taking several hours to familiarize themselves with the terrain and flagging a corridor with the use of a clinometer, a hand-held device that calculates grade. The work crew then comes in and clears the corridor. “That’s the hardest part,” Mann said. “It’s all manpowered tools except for a chain saw when we have an occasional tree that needs to be removed.”
Crew members pull up the smaller seedlings and pull out the root systems. If they are not removed, the woody material will eventually decay and create holes in the trail susceptible to erosion.
“The whole concept is sustainability,” Mann said. “We want to construct a trail that we never have to touch again except for an occasional tree that falls over the trail or a branch that needs to be trimmed.”
The trail doesn’t have much signage, yet, but Mann knows it is already getting used.
“My wife and I were out here Memorial Day weekend, and in a 45-minute period, we came across 16 users,” he said. It is not uncommon for the crew to put in a few hours of work on a Thursday afternoon and find, by the following Saturday, that the new section of trail has been packed down by riders.
Mann would like to see more people volunteer their time to help build the trail. As an incentive, the Cronies group has partnered with Mid-Life Cycle of Waupaca to give away a Surly Karate Monkey singlespeed mountain bike valued at more than $1,000. Workers are entered into a drawing to win the bike for every six hours they spend working on the trail.
A crew heads out to the trail from 3:30 p.m. to dusk each Thursday as well as on an occasional Sunday afternoon. “We have people come help us from Oshkosh, Neenah and Fond du Lac,” Mann said. “They’re not out here on a regular basis, but if they get out here once a month, it’s help that we otherwise wouldn’t have.”
Mann added, “The people out here have sacrificed their biking time so when it’s all said and done, a small group of us will have close to 80 to 100 hours of volunteer time in. The most rewarding part is seeing the users on the trail.”
Anyone interested in helping build singletrack at Hartman Creek State Park should call Mann at 715/256-0031 or e-mail croniestrailcrew@gmail.com. More information is posted at www.croniestrailbuilding.blogspot.com.
Greg Seubert is a sports editor for the Waupaca County Post weekly newspaper.
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