Pinjar Progress Report

10-Nov-2010

Good and bad news from Pinjar. This week the work started on grading and rolling the trail surface, installing signs and preparing for the new trails to be open for riding.

DEC provided two water tankers to wet down the limestone, and a vibra-roller to compact the trail surface. A contractor with a small grader was engaged to level the limestone 'sausage' prior to rolling.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, as is often the case with construction projects, we have hit some hurdles.

The small grader was unable to complete the PeeWee trail because the trail is too tight. DEC's new Positrak was brought in but it was quickly apparent that it would take too long to do the rough levelling, so we will need to bring in a loader to do this work.

The unseasonally dry weather has also dried out the limestone to such an extent that it needs massive amounts of watering to make it wet enough to work with properly. With a twenty minute refilling turnaround the two water tankers were not able to keep pace with the grader and roller. So a third water tanker was brought in and a closer source of water to refill was identified.

If we get decent rain on Wednesday we may be able to pick up some pace and by Thursday we are hoping to have: a loader to level the Pee Wee trail, the PosiTrak to do the finessing of the trails, three water tankers, a 10,000 litre mobile water tank for re-filling, the vibra-roller for compacting and another loader for shifting debris to block off cross-trails.

The guys at DEC have been fantastic with their commitment to this project, but even with this massive effort it is unlikely that we will be able to finish both trails by the weekend, so we will need to close off the unfinished sections as best we can to prevent them getting damaged before we are able to finish the compacting.

We certainly won't be promoting anything generally for this weekend, but it would be good to have some of the Friends of Pinjar group out there on the weekend to keep an eye on things.

A further update on progress will be issued on Friday.

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