’ve been pretty busy for the last month or two building some new tracks (hence lack of updates – sorry Dirt!). I’m finally back home in England so I thought I’d give you some news on my latest excavations.

After I finished work in Val di Sole in Italy, I went to Vallnord in Andorra to work on their 4X track for the World Cup next May. I arrived to find that they couldn’t find a digger the size I’d asked for. Hmmm, here we go, I thought. I’d asked for a 20 tonner so we could shift a lot of dirt in the time we had. Turned out they could only get a 32 tonne excavator. That’s pretty damn big! The bucket alone was nearly 2 metres wide.

I was working with Oscar Laqueva, who happens to be Cedric Gracia’s manager. Cedric turned up a few times (complete with pot on his mullered wrist) to give some input which was really useful. Hopefully his wrist will be sorted soon so he can get back to some riding. The Fort Bill 4X did a pretty good job on his wrist, but he seemed to think it’s getting a lot better now.

Work went pretty well. We had some snow but it made no difference to the digger, so we carried on even though it was baltic. We built a nice long first straight, a split line of big step downs and massive step downs (take your pick), another split line of big jumps or massive gaps (take your pick again) plus some big berms and some tight stuff.

Some of the track needs to be built on the ski slope so we have to wait until after the winter for that. I’ll be back in Vallnord for that as soon as the snow melts. If it doesn’t melt in time? Hmm, maybe we could have some snow sections for the World Cup??

Tomorrow, I’ll let you know about the next track I built, Houffalize in Belgium.