Slaying The JabbaRocky!

Dino, Seth and I skipped out of work early on Friday in order to visit Westbank’s new JabbaRocky trail, located west of Rose Valley Lake.

The directions ( posted on the Kelowna Bike Club’s website - www.mtbco.ca ) are easy to follow and the trailhead well marked. It warned about switchbacks, and the route has no lack of them; some 50 switchbacks lead up to the turnoff to the new JabbaRocky DH section. The trail splits at this point, and I know not where the main right-hand trail continues onto. The trail as far as the JabbaRocky junction, along with it’s many switchbacks are very well built; an amazing number of man-hours has gone into this section of trail (about 4.2km) Kudos to the trail builders!

Once at the JabbaRocky sign and onto the ‘JabbaRocky Proper’ trail, things begin to get a little dicey. Keep in mind that this is a signed DH trail; though I’m not sure how many would ride a true DH bike up this far on the switchback trail. The new route starts out nice, but quickly deteriorates into an erosion-fest of hell bent for leather sliding and further damaging an already damaged trail.

It’s not all like this; many lengths of the descent were pure joy; but the three or four ‘trench-in-the-making’ sections were really disappointing to see. I realize that some cats just love steeps (me too!), but trails of that nature have to be armored or developed on bedrock surfaces. As it now stands, those sections of JabbaRocky that are already badly eroded will only get worse (much worse) until no one on an ‘all mountain’ bike wants to bother riding them anymore.

As it stands; numerous components of JW's DH section remain a textbook example of how (not) to build a trail... Bummer dude!

Oh well, the next time that I ride the area, I’ll give JabbaRocky a pass and continue up along the trail that brought me to its junction; I suspect that there is some real trail love beyond J.W’s turnoff… Below are some pics of the day:


The ascent begins in earnest (well, in Westbank actually...)




Switchbacks; loads of em' - well built, on solid ground




First Viewpoint




Machino




Trail Namesake




Beauty vistas over Rose Valley Lake




Dino; wondering why so many red dots were required for such an obvious trail...



For a visual overview of the trail, click on this link

So there you have it; a mixed bag. I urge someone to head up the switchbacks as far as the JabbaRocky sign / turnoff - but continue onward and upward... and let us know what you find!

A.