Transcript
Barrett Brown Single Track (Motorcycle) Dozer
September 27, 2011
Event: A motorcycle trail dozer was purchased for use on the Black Hills National Forest. It can be driven or operated remotely and specializes in creating motorcycle trails. It will also serve to build and mantain other OHV trails.
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Barrett Brown, President, Single Track LLC
Mechanical noises, clicking sounds Today we’ve got a group of people out for training and orientation on this new machine, and we just happen to have access to a really good location where we have the combination of some mitigation measures that we need to take and erosion problems where trails were not properly designed and engineered and replace them with a well-engineered trail that is both fun to ride and sustainable. We’ve got a nice opportunity to combine some training with some real improvement to the trail system. As we learn more and more about the need to develop sustainable trail systems, trail systems where we’re not dumping sedimentation into streams and were stable and staying in place, there’s no denying that that’s the direction of our sport really rely on. Getting our trails into the kind of shape that we can be proud of, proud to take anybody out into the forest and show them about our sport, and it was no longer just a luxury about trying to save my own back. We needed some kind of machine that could keep up with the demand of relocating trails that were poorly located, and keeping up with the expanded demand for outdoor recreation. This is a purpose-built machine just for building and maintaining recreation trails. It has a six-way dozer blade on the front of the machine, driven by steel dozer-type track and a hoe and bucket and thumb over the front of that six-way blade for doing the more heavy duty gravel and rock and stuff like that. The key feature is that it’s a very narrow machine. It’s 24 inches wide at its narrowest, so that when you’re are building trails and you are moving the amount of dirt we need to do it’s only impacting the environment to the extent that’s necessary to move a human, or a bicycle, or a motorcycle through the forest. The remote control feature allows you to build even more technically challenging trail, narrower trail than you might otherwise. Where there are conditions that you might normally have to cut several trees down to make a wide enough path for the operator to feel safe, in this case you can leave most of the terrain in place, get off the machine and move through safely.

Ben Schumacher, Travel Management, Black Hills National Forest
This training started yesterday. We were up in Hill City. We went through the mechanical overview, kind of some of the ins and outs of the machine, some of the maintenance, some of the specifics about the equipment and then today came out to do an actual on the field, kind of show-me tour, of what you can do with the machine, what it’s designed to do, and what we will be doing with it in years down the road. Equipment noises From what I’ve seen, and like I said this is the first time using the machine, so the remote control joysticks are a little different to operate, but it’s very straightforward. There’ll be a learning curve on it for sure, but it seems to be real sound, and pretty easy to operate for a novice user. Machine noises You can build trails by hand as Barrett talked about. They’ve been doing it since they’ve had people walking through the hills and doing motorized trails. The obvious advantage to it is instead of having 20 people out swinging tools for days on end, you can have two to three people out with one piece of equipment and virtually doing work, and leaving the same scar on the landscape and getting the same use out of it. After we get more familiar with this machine and we become better operators our production is gonna go up substantially and that’s when we’re gonna see the real benefit of the machine is being able to go out with the youth groups, show ‘em where we want to go, and have them work with us so that we can produce a lot of trail in a shorter amount of time.

Barrett Brown, President, Single Track LLC
Having visited here now, and delivered the machine, I’ve had a chance to learn a little bit more about the Black Hills. It’s more than just a customer who bought a machine from us. What I’ve found is this is exactly the setting, this is exactly the type of land management environment, and exactly the kind of user community that we had in mind for this machine. The combination of volunteers, informed, really state-of-the-art informed management teams who understand about recreation, not just transportation, but actual recreation trails, has been incredibly rewarding.