Hello!

Thanks to an awesome effort all round, Saturdays session saw real
progress made on Mushroom Soup.

After thinking some more about the drainage work required on the upper
section of the trail, I realised it would require *an awful lot* of
digging to create the drainage channel needed along the top side of the
trail to properly capture the water seeping out of the hill.

I have to admit here that earlier in the week I even stopped by the
trail to recce' the possibility of squeezing a mini digger in to do
most of the digging for us. This was never going to happen as: (a) it's
way too tight in there for any digger to squeeze in (short of felling a
bunch of trees, which goes against Trailfairy principles*) and (b) mini
digger + roots and large trenches = too flippin' sketchy.

*Next potential 'fairy project (code named 'Fatties') excepted. More
on this soon..

So hand digging it was to be. How do I sell the prospect of hand
digging a 20m drain for a whole session to the 'fairies I thought?
It's hardly the most glamourous of jobs after all, not exactly building
a sweet bit of northshore or building a nice rock drop off. The best I
could do was a picture of what my plan was for the drainage and 4 boxes
of Jaffa Cakes. The picture seemed to go down well, though the lack of
*any* scale didn't go unnoticed! As didn't my ability to swap between
metric and imperial measurements at will! Lucky then that a jaffa box
acted as the perfect width for the foundation trench for the trail edge
rock pitching!

The 'fairies got stuck straight into it, led by the 'human digger' that
is Rich Latimer! Just watching Rich work makes me want to curl up
under a tree and take a nap!

Meanwhile, the 'fairy numbers were boosted by the arrival of a group of
keen young un's from Adventure Edinburgh and their leader Richard. The
guys came down before Christmas to help on the trail and were back for
some more. They got on with surfacing the drier stretch of trail
leading upto the 'Helter Skelter' and also widening said turn out a
little more. Over the course of the session they guys hardly stopped
and managed to shift a huge amount of stone from the road above to the
trail. Even more impressive that they managed to avoid wiping out in a
tree coming down the access path with the wheel barrows!

By the end of the session, the whole of the drainage channel and rock
edging trench had been dugout, Helter Skelter had been tweaked and
around 10m of trail had been surfaced.

A fantastic effort all round. A big thank you to 'fairies Kenneth,
Malcolm, Archie, Alasdair, Chris, Matthew, Rich, Abbey, Angus, Steven,
Alister, Moray, Bob....

...and Rich, Ruairidh, Glen, James, Jamie, Allan, Rosie and Grant from
Adventure Edinburgh.

I've put a few pics up in the photos bit from the session, apologies
for the crapness of these! The light was not the best, honest!

The next session is on Sat 8th March. I'll get more surfacing material
delivered up aswell as rocks for the trail edge pitching and pipe
before then. Feel like this trail is finally starting to come
together. I'm excited!

Hopefully see you at the next session.

Cheers,

Andy