Hero vs. Zero (dirt)?

Oh man, it’s raining.  Can’t wait to hit the hero dirt, and shred (insert your favorite trail name).  It’s gonna be so tacky, like velcro!  Let’s go tomorrow…

How do you know if it’s Hero Dirt or if riding it makes you a Zero?

At precisely 10:55am today I snuck over to my local trails, Sunday’s rain wasn’t even on my mind.  Up the horse trail I shot, right into some pretty wet dirt.  Uh oh, it did rain the other day.  But, this moisture was only from poorly aimed community sprinklers.

This trail goes from packed in gravel to dirt with lots of clay.

Lots of clay means if it’s wet your knobbies are going to fill with mud and in no time you’ll be carrying that bike praying your shoes don’t get sucked off your feet.

I could feel the pull of the moisture on my tires.  Lots of grip, lots of drag.

No mud in the knobbies = Hero Dirt.

There were a few wet spots that I found miles from the trail head.  Not much you can do about that, and the were small and easy to get around.

Ride On.

Some trails are so rocky, or have so much DG (decomposed granite) that you can ride them within hours of rain… others, like the ones by my house can take days to dry out.

If you ride your trails too soon they develop huge grooves down the middle where more rain will pour in and turn the grooves to troughs.  Not good.

Right after it rains you’ll see a few Zero’s out being very greedy…

But you’ll also find real HEROES:

…who take shovels and make sweet berms and jumps,

filling in troughs and braking bumps.

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