Gauntlet Trail - Apex

A crew of us rode and cleared the Gauntlet trail leading off the summit of Apex Resort, down to the bottom of the Quickdraw Quad chairlift.

There was only one tree that we were unable to remove; chainsaw required...

The top-most section of the Gauntlet is eroded to hell and back, so take your time passing through the first half km or so. The balance of the trail is in quite good condition, including quite a number of small bridges.

A.

Thanks for the tree removal. This trail was destroyed when the motocross racers used it a few years ago and will never truly recover. Too bad as it provided a nice early and late season option up at Apex. IT would take a lot of work to re-route the trail so we have concentrated on the Good bad and Ugly trail to the north as it is much smoother.

Nonetheless, some minor signage down lower where the Gauntlet repeatedly crosses ski-trails would be great. I'll put some orange and silver metal arrow signage up there next summer.

Also, I believe that we should take on rerouting that crazy-extreme-eroded entry to the trail-proper up top; say 250 lineal meters or so of more subtly angled singletrack would go a long way toward making the trail viable again.

The main problem wasn't so much the dirt bikes, though I agree that they do a lot of damage to singletrack in general. The bigger issue was the design and implementation of the trail surface in the first place. If you look at the trail, you can see right off the bat that the folks who built it didn't have a full grasp of the power of water and attendant erosion / control; not in the pitch as implemented nor in the shedding of water from the trail tread.

Two meters of snowpack equals a sheitteload of meltwater! That, and quite often when its lightly drizzling down in the valley, its pouring hard in the alpine.

Do you live on the mountain?

Andrew

You are right - it was never put in the right place. We rode it on Sunday and it was a mess. I don't wish to sound cynical but to me the whole top half of the trail is a rough ride. As you said it fills with rocks and water steadily and I didn't really look for another route. I was fighting for survival!
No I live in kelowna but we have a place up there and go up often. We are in Creekview court just off of Grandfathers. Built a few more things on Good, bad and ugly on the weekend. It is smooth now.

Have you been on it lately?