Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Elizabeth said:

> the miles of trail don't cost anything.  
Nooooo. Miles of trail cost in blood, sweat, RM time finding the trails,
more RM and volunteer time maintaining the trails, and the more trail you
have (especially in forested areas), the more work it is to get together.
Even if you don't have trees to deal with, there's rocky sections to clear.

In the ride I just helped with, we had somewhere around 2 person-months of
effort that went into putting together a full 50 miles of trail without
significant repeats. We put 2 person-days into one 2 mile stretch by itself,
a bit more on a shorter section where we made new trail. This is based from
established trails. Then figure that while the RM didn't have to drive very
far to come help, we did. I spent around $600 in fuel to come help with that
ride, as did another couple who live near us. If you do the math on this, it
comes to around $5000 to get the trail ready (though much of that isn't out
of pocket - it is a cost). 

So there were about 30 25 mile riders. They went altogether 750 miles of
trail. The 30 50 mile riders went 1500 miles of trail. Total would be 2250.
If we're then going to divide out that cost evenly, it comes to around
$2/mile of trail, so if you could actually afford to pay your trail workers
and pay yourself for setting up the trail, it should cost the LD riders $50,
the 50 mile riders $100, and then you add in fixed rider costs, like
porta-potties, t-shirts, and so on.

If we'd had a lower quality ride (or if a 25-only were possible), and only
had 25 miles of trail, we could have put that together in roughly 1/2 the
time (AND COST).

The further you go, the more RM, vet and volunteer time you consume, the
more water they have to put out, and so on. While _some_ costs are
per-rider, many others are proportional to distance, mainly effort to have
good trail, and next time you think that's cheap, go pitch in and help a RM
get a ride together.

Now, all this does depend on the ride. There's a great ride near Prineville
that just has one 25 mile loop, and you do it once or twice. The out loop
for the 75's is the only real variance. Then you just have the cost of
keeping all the ride support people busy for 1/2 day or a whole day. Either
way, the further you go, the more resources you consume, sometimes
tremendously so.

As Joe points out, LD is how we get people into this. Charging a lot won't
help get them into it. If you get businesslike about it and really figure in
all your costs, it quickly becomes apparent that the further you go, the
more you really ought to pay.


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