Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Wicked trails in the Wissahickon

Subaru/IMBA Trail Care Crew returns to this urban hot bed for trails

June 2004: The Subaru/IMBA Trail Care Crew visited Philadelphia, PA to teach trailbuilding techniques and help restore a badly-eroded section of trail. Philadelphia is blessed with Wissahickon Park, a large, wooded expanse within the city limits. The park provides incredible recreation opportunities to the city's residents who like to hike, bike, ride horses, fish, and picnic. Unfortunately, most of the trails are old service and utility roads, and were not designed for recreation use. Steep, fall-line trails, coupled with very high usage, has created severe erosion and trail widening in many areas of the park.

The IMBA Trailbuilding School was attended by members of IMBA-affiliated Jersey Action Riders and Delaware Valley Mountain Bike Patrol, Friends of the Wissahickon, Wissahickon Restoration Volunteers, and local park rangers. Everyone worked together over the two days to reroute a section of trail that had been severely scoured by stormwater runoff from an adjacent parking lot. A sturdy rock crossing was laid in over the drainage channel and connected to the existing trail by a new section of bench-cut singletrack. Care was taken to transplant vegetation out of the new corridor and into the surrounding open area. Finally, a rolling grade dip was built across the old trail to keep the stormwater along its proper course, and chokes set at the top of the trail to slow down users as they approached the reroute.

After Sunday's work session, local riders took the Trail Care Crew out on an extended tour of the park's trails, completing the full 18-mile loop, replete with flowing singletrack, technical rock sections, and urban freeriding along above-ground stormwater pipes.