Building a Huge Corkscrew at the Next #1 Downhill Bike Park in the US!

What you're looking at is possibly the

next

best

downhill

park

in the United States, with 650 feet of elevation gain, massive rock walls, and big, steep descents. This spot is naturally perfect for some fast, quality

downhill

trails, but perfect natural terrain isn't all you need. Great trails take dedicated people to find the best of the best on the mountainside, and fortunately, the city of Ironton brought in ax-toothed trail designs to make it happen. These people are

building

truly inspiring trails here on Shepherd Mountain and at the end. Of phase one, the mountain will have two black lines, two blue lines, and one green, and that's just phase one, but even with all this trail being built, Alex, the owner of Jagged Ax, reached out to me for a special project out of nowhere.

I received a couple of text messages and a picture reading. I would love to collaborate if you are willing to do so. It would be a pretty serious task, but I think it would be cool to build a

corkscrew

bridge from this ledge. Of course I answered yes. Yeah, and so we got going, he added to the conversation his employee Taylor, who sketched out this design, and we all immediately agreed that that seemed like the way to go, so I drove to Ironton and we started making this project a reality. before we did it. Let's get into it, let me say a

huge

thank you to my

bike

rack supplier, u-haul, for sponsoring this video, as you can probably guess that

building

a

corkscrew

is no easy task, there are a lot of things to consider before even marking out where the rack can go. publication.

So we spent this first day cleaning the entire area, brainstorming and figuring out how big this thing was going to be and after countless times of measuring and exploring the area, we finally landed on the corkscrew which is 30 feet in diameter and 14 feet tall. high with everything marked, there was no doubt about it, this thing was going to be

huge

, which meant a lot of posts, which also meant a lot of post holes, so Alex ended up getting his mini excavator out to make quick work of it, but the things don't. go out as planned, coach there, I mean we're not going to need a concrete here that's a ledge, oh really, yeah, okay, so what we're finding out is that there's actually a giant slab of rock underneath everything. this, so we may not end up needing everything.

The concrete we just mentioned, but that's okay, it will make the job easier and yes, Alex says it's just as good as concrete, so I think now, regardless of what we were tying down, we still needed to use steel supports and bolts. anchor to hold. Our posts in place, all the bedrock did was keep us from having to pour more than two of these concrete bases and the steel supports and anchor bolts were a pretty simple process to install, all you have What to do is drill a hole in the place of the rock. our bolt in with the steel bracket and hammer the pin into the bolt which causes the bolt to swell on the inside this way it stays anchored to the rock and you can secure your post to the steel bracket where it will actually sit the post. this little box you tie around the edges but it's suspended because you have this box here that's going to sit underneath and that's where the bolt is that we tie to, so if the water goes through it it won't get caught in the register on yes to the one you are tying after two full days of cleaning marks and anchor bolts, we finally had everything in place to start building our corkscrew, except one thing: the wood, but if you look at my channel, you will know that I have a sawmill local that I removed all my cedar, so I was able to take Alex with me and grab a full load of the trailer, but the problem we were going to have was getting all that wood to the building location, which was probably over 200 feet of extremely steep steep Luckily for us, we had a solution for this and that solution is called John John, who works for the city of Ironton, and he happened to have one of these hummers on hand, so of course we loaded it up as much as we could and crossed our fingers that nothing would fall or pass this is fantastic if it slides around then you will have a very bad time up there what is the verdict do you think he is going to make it up or do you think he is going to call it yes, I think he will do it, I think the only problem is that it's sliding down, i don't think it's now, this is an extreme case of gopro effect when it comes to how steep this hill was, but despite all my thoughts, jon made it to the top without any problem.

So, with much of our dimensional lumber already on top, Alex and I got to work gathering support posts, so by the end of the weekend I had removed eight seats that were over 20 feet long, but I was very happy with the ones we got. and happy to take the time to shape our own posts instead of buying pressure treated lumber at the store, the

next

day we quickly prepared all the posts for the project and finally began building the corkscrew each post had to get this square cut at the bottom. so that when we lifted them they would fit snuggly and the steel supports would be anchored to the rock, this wasn't so bad, but lifting them up was kind of a joke, do it, okay, okay, seth, just throw it here, that's it.

It's going to be a holy cow, what do you think? There's no way he won't end up bullying before we can keep the goalposts upright. We decided to anchor our structure to the rock face with two huge six-by-six cedar trees. To do this, we drill two holes. into the rock and stuck a thick piece of rebar into them, from there we were able to drill a hole in the six by sixes and place them on the rebar now I have to say before you see this, don't follow our safety practices, we are there At this point we had a solid foundation to start working from, so we could really start building the entire corkscrew frame.

This basically meant raising more posts, adding cross boards for support, and making sure everything fit perfectly with the ground in the end. my neighborhood and so, we have the whole Taylor corkscrew frame and I put the finishing touches on everything and got it ready to decorate over the weekend. It's so hot that the cameras that are there with me keep turning off because their temperature is overheating on top of the terrible heat. I was also having to sort out a couple more issues, one of them being that the center boards needed to be chiseled for each individual board, this is because the inside angle drop is very different from the camber. of the outside angle, so there was no way to keep the middle board completely level.

This also caused a large gap at the end of one side of the boards, which meant we had to shimmy them. The only way to avoid this would have been to cut the runners like you would a set of steps, but even the sets of stairs have wedges, so I kept moving forward and over the next few days Porter and Taylor appeared, making the process of Installation of the platform will fly by after two weeks of work. When we finished the corkscrew, we had to cut a lot of boards like pizza slices to make them fit properly, but seriously, I couldn't be more excited about how it ended up looking, even though the corkscrew was finished, we weren't completely out of the woods.

However, we had one last thing to take care of before we could ride and that was to run. It's a super thick section of rock that you have to navigate to get to the corkscrew, so to make it a little more doable, I added a platform section over the most ridiculous section of rocks and taylor and alex sketched out the top by cutting off some of the rocks and luckily, while i had been platforming, taylor and alex had already formed a berm coming out of the corkscrew and taylor added rocks at the beginning and alex and i added rocks at the end to make for a smooth entry and exit.

I didn't like it now, of course, these guys were riding it, no problem, but as you know, I generally don't use double black features, but there was no way in hell I wasn't going to ride this thing after doing all that work. . I have that feeling like you're going to hit something and you're going to get pushed and shoot yourself if you go here. you're okay if you go there you're okay you go there you're probably okay if you go there although I'm going there yeah this corkscrew turned out perfect it's going to be such an iconic feature for Shipper Mountain Bike Park and I'm so excited to have been able to be a part of it.

Now the Bike Park isn't open yet, but it will be soon, so if you want to stay up to date on what's happening here, follow Shepard Mountain.

bike

park

on instagram and the same goes for jagged ax trail designs, they post regularly about what they are doing on the mountain and they are also about to start their trail building youtube channel so follow that too. I also want to say a big thank you to u-haul for sponsoring this build and bringing me here. You should go check out the great selection of bike racks they offer. I have number 120 and I am madly in love with it. and my beautiful polygon siskiyou came out to ride this huge feature and I couldn't be more excited about how easy it is to use, go to uhaul.com and check out all the bike racks they offer and if you find one you like use the code the backyard in all caps to get 15 off your purchase.

Thank you all so much for watching this week. A huge thank you to my sponsors, as always, damn guys, let's build more stuff next week and see you around. So Shep is there. the sender