Do Invisible Work

Not all good work is invisible but only good work can be invisible, or at least only good work can stay invisible for long. I've been thinking about this while doing mountain bike trail maintenance. A lot of maintenance work is invisible. To keep a trail in good shape you sometimes have to remove soft moisture-absorbing plant-based soil with rocks and hard mineral-based soil that doesn't absorb as much water, and therefore erodes more slowly. Of course if you put the good hard soil on top of squishy absorbent soil the whole thing will slide around when the weather gets wet. You have to dig down until you hit rock or good solid soil before you start adding material. This means a lot of the good dirt and rock that you end up adding get buried under the trail surface. When you ride it you only think about the soil right on the top. All the deeper work is invisible. It's the invisible stuff that makes the work last.

Invisibility is not just an unintentional characteristic of maintenance; it can be something to strive for. It takes practice to ride a particular part of a trail well, and if you change something that someone has spent a lot of time learning how to ride they are going to feel like you've robbed them of their hard-won victory. If you fill a mundane hole or firm up a soggy spot most people will roll over it without thinking about it because they haven't invested any time in learning to ride that particular hole. This is what I aim for. I choose carefully what to maintain I hope it inspires a feeling of "the trail felt good today", rather than "the trail changed and now it's easier and less rewarding".

When I do maintenance it's always pretty obvious that the soil has been disturbed, but after a year I hope it will all look like just the shape the forest always had.

Dig subtly, dig deep, and rebuild in such a way that people will assume it was always like that. If nobody says "thanks" assume it's because you did a good job. If you ever ride a trail called Single Track Mind in Squamish I hope you don't have to think much about the spots where I did maintenance.

Written: 2020-07-12

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