It's the dirt

Today I met someone who subscribes to Oly Dirt.  I'm taking this as an indicator that there are people out there who actually read my attempts at jaded cynicism.  As a celebration of my newfound readership, I dedicate this piece of amateur journalism to Trey: the subscriber.

As you may have seen, we recently upgraded our logo.  According to the rule of "everything considered worthy of attention in Olympia must be written in a particular font hereby dictated as that which adorns the cans of holy Oly brew," our blog is now considered worthy of attention.  The slogan came naturally.  If you don't know what we mean by "its the dirt," then you first need to watch this video:


Pacific Northwest - Yeti Cycles from Yeti Cycles on Vimeo.

Now, take every glorified soft corner and slow motion roost shot in this video and think about the complete opposite.  Olympia has two types of dirt:  gravel pit and slick mud.  In technical terms, these are actually called glacial till and pure clay, respectively.  During the pleistocene epoch, the Cordilleran ice sheet's Puget lobe ended right around Olympia.  In fact, the Black hills (an area now mostly contained by Capitol Forest) were untouched by the last glaciation.  If you have ever wondered why Capitol Forest doesn't have the epic rock ridges and random granite boulders that make for incredible riding terrain from Seattle to British Columbia, the answer lies in the glaciers.  Rock ridges are the peaks of giant gouges scratched into bedrock from the passage of glaciers. Those granite boulders are glacial erratics, rocks that were transported for thousands of miles trapped in ice until being dumped off as the glacier melted.

Big rock=big jumps.  Photo: B. Walton

 Seeing as the black hills were not a part of the Cordilleran ice party, they didn't get any glacial erratic favors.  Instead, we were stuck with the shitty detritus of 90,000 years of ice as the glacier melted its way back to Canada.  Water running out of the melting icepack flowed in a giant stream between the Black hills and the Cascades, leaving behind Mima Mounds (although that's debated) and a huge dump of gravelly loam.  I know that every mountain biker on Earth thinks that loam is god's gift to rubber tires, but I'm talking about by its geologic definition: a mix of sand, silt, and clay.  Add a large dose of small rocks in there, and you have gravelly loam.  To recap: Olympia has two kinds of dirt, gravel and slick clay, and its all because we missed out on the glaciers.  When people talk about awesome NW dirt, they're talking about the dirt up north.  Don't be confused.

Here's some DNR stuff about the glaciers.

To get back to that video - despite the ridiculous dirt porn going on for most of it, it was good to see some real PNW trail bike shredding.  I wish I could shred corners like that all day.  Take note, FOCF:  that's what a real bike corner looks like.  Thanks for building.