[MidAtlanticXCer]

GAAAAAH!!! Who keeps putting the highly unneccessary and rather dangerous water bar(s) back on the yellow trail at Gambrill? It's gotta be hikers and not MTBers, since no one who rides a bike would be dumb enough to put a raised water bar on a turn in the middle of a rocky descent (and yes, I did endo AND bend the rim). Especially when the trail holds up quite well to rain with no help needed, thank you very much. We keep taking it out and they keep putting it back. This is war, people! Anyone have a contact number for the cognizant ranger out there?

 

[EABiker]

Sorry to hear about your crash and bend! Wherabouts is this said waterbar, and which direction (clockwise or counter) do you ride? I may have seen it going uphill. It's wierd up there, sometimes a nice log jump is removed; guess it is too hard to step over, or as happened here, an obtrusive water bar appears that makes little sense. I guess all this is just to keep the Yellow trail unpredictable!?
EA

 

[MidAtlanticXCer]

Yellow, west side of the road

I was riding from Hamburg going South. We were headed South on the yellow on the west side of Gambrill park rd; this hill is downhill in that direction. For reference, it is right after a very technical rocky climb (which is about half walk for me, still), before you get to the short little chunk of trail that is now verboten to us MTBers that goes to an overlook spot.
If we saw any signs of bedding in, we'd just leave it, but even after a series of big rains, there is no dirt collecting upstream of the bar, which indicates that it ain't doing jack.

FWIW, I actually rather like water bars where they are actually performing a function and catching dirt so that it doesn't wash off the trail - after a while they can get bedded in well enough to be fun to jump. The bars on the blue north of hamburg being a great example of that.

 

[EABiker]

Gotcha! I went up over that one, (or at least tried to!). Funny you mentioned the Blue Trail bars; I was doing that trail downhill a couple of seasons ago when the workers were just tamping the dirt in above those bars. I got to be the lab test rat to see if the bars were too high! Gave them a pretty lame show, but at least they could sleep that night!

 

[riderx]

Drop a line to MORE, either Erin G. or Phil W. is the trail liason for Gambrill. They can get in touch with the proper park people.

 

[MidAtlanticXCer]

D'oh!

Drop a line to MORE, either Erin G. or Phil W. is the trail liason for Gambrill. They can get in touch with the proper park people.

Of course, I will do just that.