Off-Highway Vehicle Trail and Road Grading Equipment

Equipment Evaluations on the Francis Marion National Forest

Summary of South Carolina Field Evaluations

All three graders effectively graded parts of the Wambaw Cycle Trail. None of the graders completed the task in a single pass. Graders required three or four passes to completely remove whoop-de-doos.

All three graders were too wide for this particular trail, and would be too wide for most motorcycle trails and some ATV trails in forested settings. The equipment is also too wide for hiking and equestrian trails. The problem was that the graders had a hard time negotiating corners and avoiding trailside trees. The graders tended to track the inside corner of turns, but the tread material that needed to be brought back onto the trail was bermed along the outside edge. The graders worked best on straight sections of trail and on trails with gradual curves.

Frequent curves are designed into these trails to differentiate them from roads and to make them fun to ride. Straightening or widening trails to make them easier to maintain could reduce user satisfaction. Trails would become B-O-R-I-N-G.

Although the graders are designed to pull tread material back onto the trail from the edges, none of the three graders could reach more than a few inches beyond the edges of the trail to pull in bermed material. The Trail Rake was a little better than the others. Depending on the amount of tread that had been eroded or cast off the trail, the graded trailbed was lower than surrounding terrain. Although this wasn't a problem in the porous, sandy soil of coastal South Carolina, creating such a trench in the heavier soils or in erosion-prone areas would cause water to run down the trail or to pool.

The best solution for severely eroded trails is to bring in additional clean, structural fill material (from the berms or somewhere else), raising the tread surface to grade. Effective drainage structures would need to be installed to move water off the trail. You will want to assess whether such a solution, with regular maintenance, is going to be permanent. If not, consider closing and restoring that trail segment if a better route can be found.

In soft soils, it's best to keep users off the trail after grooming. The longer, the better. One day is better than none, and a week is better yet. "Setting up" depends on soil moisture. Some of the loops on the South Carolina cycle trail are closed for an entire season to allow rainfall to "set up" the trail, forming a hard, compacted surface.