Building My Own Mountain Bike Trail

I have wanted to build my own personal mountain bike trail for a very long time... probably since I first started mountain biking. The opportunity (i.e. time and land) never really presented itself... until now.

Admittedly, I still don't really have the time to do it (who does?) and we don't have much land to work with, but we're going for it anyways! The woods in question is a little patch of forest at my inlaws'. For some reason, I had never realized how actually lay inside their boundary lines. When I realized it a few weeks ago, I quickly got permission from my father-in-law to turn it into a mountain bike trail! Since they live an hour and a half away, we only get over there every now and then, so I didn't get a chance to start on the trail until this weekend (written a couple of weeks ago).

Since the area is so small, we're winding the trail back and forth in order to fit as much singletrack in as possible. There's going to be one long downhill straightaway, but the rest will be pretty slow-speed trail. Since the trail is so tight and there won't be much of it, obviously this won't be a great trail for getting miles in your legs.

Instead, in honor of the severe lack of technical mountain biking in the state of Georgia, we are going to build as gnarly of a trail as we possibly can! Plans include rock gardens, tons of bridges, skinnies, a few jumps, a drop or two, berms, and log-overs.

The question: is there anything that you think we should specifically build into this trail?

What we've got done so far:

So far we've (my brother-in-law, Andrew, and I) cut the corridor and raked out all of section 1 and part of section 2. (Section 1 is going to be tight and twisty and section 2 is the long downhill). We still need to dig down to dirt and dig in a benchcut in spots, and then start building features.

The going has been tough and it's just getting tougher... as you can see from the last photo, it's basically like trying to cut a trail through a flippin' jungle. So yeah, it's a lot of work, but when it's done... it will be well worth it!

I'm hoping to have all 5 sections cut and the tread dug in by the end of the winter. After that, it's time to build technical features!

I'll use this thread to keep ya'll updated on how things progress (this article originally posted as a thread to Singletracks.com). And I'd love to hear some feedback on what features you think we should build in to the trail!

Photos of what we've built so far: