Building & Riding a FAST wooden berm

Kevin's jump looks pretty complicated. He's been raining, snowing, freezing, thawing and just being winter. But all things considered, we've got it pretty good here, and on a good day like today I can get these functions back up and running in no time. But the

wooden

lip we built takes no time to get up and running. And every time I do a task like fine-tuning this

berm

, I wonder how we're going to keep this place going when I'm 5 or 6. And it turns out we need another

berm

or something. If you can make it to the landing of this iconic testament to incompleteness, there's a 90-degree turn that, of course, requires hard braking.

Then you'll have to run to catch up to the next grade, and that's not as efficient. But if we are going to build a berm here, it will definitely be made of wood. The only problem is that I have never built a

wooden

berm. Of course, the other Seth just built an awesome plywood berm on his log pump road. We could just copy his blueprint, but the plywood won't have the traction we need with dirty tires. Our berm must be made of boards. Or in the case of our model, ice cream sticks. Since he has never built a wooden berm before, this is a good experiment to work out the mistakes.

And it's already clear that we'll need to make some changes to the real version. We'll have to anchor it to the ground and find a secure way to hold the boards together, unless someone has a giant hot glue gun. One thing I learned while

building

the model is that the radius of a berm increases as you move from the inside to the outside. Based on rough survey measurements, I'm cutting the inside radius 10.5 feet and the outside 11.5. This tape measure is a much better compass than our old rope method as it does not stretch. Every time we cut these transitions, we are left with these seemingly useless cuts.

But with the addition of the table saw, we can easily take them down and use them as stakes to anchor the berm to the ground. Unlike an earth berm, our wood berm will not curve from the bottom to the top. It will be flat, like a walk up the wall. But unlike a wall walk, it will be at a 45 degree angle. That's the angle I cut these brackets at. To join the transitions, I simply overlap them and secure them with lag screws. It will not need to be too strong since the berm will obtain its rigidity from the supports that we place behind it.

To keep the berm from sliding back, I'm driving the stakes we cut behind the bottom radius. To keep the berm from leaning back, we used larger stakes and secured them to supports at the back. Our staking solution ended up working incredibly well, but it was about to make some design mistakes that would end up making the project a little more difficult. To make the boards lie flat against the top radius, I beveled the entire edge at 45 degrees. That's when the hacking and murders began. On future berm projects, I will not overlap the transitions as it creates havoc trying to get the boards to lie flat.

Instead, I'll miter them and join them so they run in a straight line. Now that the adjustments and tinkering are complete, we can install the boards. The planks were not placed as easily as they would be on a bridge or edge. This was another learning experience and in the future I will lay down every last plank before securing any so that it looks more uniform in the end. But I still did it and they didn't look at all terrible. After a few finishing touches, our berm is complete. And it's solid. But we still have to find out if it really works.

As usual, I tried to go too woodsy and leave that rhododendron at the end. But for reasons that I hope are obvious, it had to come to light. This berm feels amazing. Everything about it is fun, functional and addictive. The only thing I would change dimensionally is to add one or two more boards at the end to really take off to the other side of the trail. But it's still cool. In fact, I'm coming off this berm so

fast

that I'm checking the brakes on the next turn, and now it needs a berm too. But the real test is to see if we can get from the first berm to the log jump without hitting the pedal.

We barely made it, but that was with a brake check in turn three. If we add a berm there, we'll have enough speed for a hip hop before the log. Meanwhile, Berm Peak is finally starting to live up to its name! Now you can white-knuckle this berm and take crazy speed down the trail, well, if you can go that far. And I guess my friends better get some practice in so they can enjoy all the cool stuff we're

building

later. Thanks for traveling with me today and we'll see you next time.