FROM THE BEGINNING by Randy Faul
Many of us attended the first HS of the season back on Sept 18/19, but a few of the SADRA members couldn’t help but think about the Oct 30/31 event that was coming up fast. Those members had a huge task to fill as we were given the news that our Skeleton Scramble location was being moved to the Cox road Clear Springs Ranch location. The deal was our Homeland location was being mined again which would take all of our south end property and the parking area. The timing couldn’t be determined as to when this would start, but sometime at the end of October. Along with the fact that Bill and I had already found and marked some really nice Sunday thick woods sections the weekend before, the bad news came that week just as we were gearing up to start the following weekend with the entire club coming out to cut a new trail. The decision brought some worries as that meant we had to move all our equipment, trailers, supplies and regroup. The only thing going for us at the time was we knew the Cox road property pretty well and it had good parking, but that also meant that we were using a section of land that
has been shared by many other organizations.
the Sunday riders a full 9 plus miles of virgin course.
After we accepted the fact that this was our home for the next month or so, work began with mapping all the new fence lines and gates which turned into a real challenge, more on that later. The basics of positioning the start and scoring came first, and then the outgoing and return trails were added. Our starting grid took a completely different approach this time with our size increasing to 300x150 and it headed south over the ridge. We had some concerns at first but with our ace equipment operator, the end result was a success.
Lots of weekends from Friday to Sunday night went into this event along with some of us arriving Tuesday and Wednesday of race week to finish preparing for the weekend event. The weather was perfect with rain on Thursday and Friday giving the dust a rest from prior weekends. This event took a tremendous amount of work, dedication, sacrifice and planning. We have some excellent passionate members of SADRA that worked their tails off, but also members of the Sunrunners club who stepped up and helped us out as they have before. I hope the membership can appreciate the amount of work that goes into these events and every club’s efforts to provide a safe, fun riding/ racing course for you and your family as these events just don’t happen overnight.
As everyone knows, this is old mining land and is very unique being that we could have sand and loose dirt in one section and hard pack terrain in the next section. That first 1.5 miles required a mowing, skid steer work, a dozer and a cultivator behind a huge tractor to get it even ride-able, and this is just a small example of how much work this property takes to lay out a trail. As the numbers turned out, the only trail used by both the Saturday and Sunday riders was the first 1.5 miles and the last 1.5 miles as it gave
FLORIDA TRAIL RIDERS
I used our event as an example of just a taste of the work that goes into these weekends. The other end of it requires securing the land, equipment rental, insurance, port a johns, dumpsters, supplies, fuel, equipment repairs, trophies, commitments from membersw, gate person-
