Billy Joe Toolbag is a nice guy who means well and likes to try new adventures. Billy Joe has recently taken up off road cycling and loves it. Unfortunately, he isn’t known for making sensible decisions, so his forays into mountain biking are no different. Follow along with Billy Joe on his misadventures and hopefully we can educate him on riding here in Kentucky.

What Mr Toolbag doesn’t know is you can hurt dirt. If you’re mountain biking in a remote location that doesn’t get a lot of use or pressure, then riding in muddy conditions is probably going to have little impact. However, in a city park or areas with high usage riding in muddy conditions, such as freeze thaw is a big problem. Mineral soil is what makes a trail hard and resilient to usage. When we build trails, we remove the organics leaving the mineral soil as our trail tread. This stuff isn’t great for growing flowers but when it comes to standing up to tons of users, mineral soil can’t be beat. During freeze thaw conditions the moisture in the mineral soil freezes and thaws which creates a structure with air and water pockets. As the surface thaws, the water has no where to go because the deeper soil is still frozen. At first it gets really slippery, but as the thaw progresses the mud continues to develop and deepens until the temperature gets cold enough to freeze all over again. When you bike, run, or walk through this continually thawing mud, you start collecting, slinging, and pushing it around, eventually off the tread. Okay no big deal it’s just a little mud, right?. Well, the more mineral soil we displace, the more the tread becomes “cupped”. Once the trail is cupped, all new precipitation is trapped on the trail. As the water collects it creates pools and runs down the trail instead of draining off the tread. As the water runs down the trail it removes more dirt as it runs down to the next drainage area. Now we have ruts and erosion issues, which leads to crappy trails and unhappy land managers. Unhappy land managers = NO NEW TRAIL for us.

So if you are leaving tracks like this…

And if your bike looks like this please stop riding and go do a ride like the River Walk. Check out the latest ride report from our River Walk winter rides, they are a lot more fun than riding the trainer in the winter!

OK when can Billy Joe Toolbag ride this winter? When it’s cloudy and below 30, then there’s a pretty good chance the trails are fine. If it’s early in the morning and very cold, then you can probably ride. If it snowed yesterday and it’s cold and cloudy today, go for it. The trails should be great! Even if its below 32 degrees, a sunny day will melt the surface and start the process described above.

So remember no sun and cold temps = mountain bike goodness this winter!