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May152017
KTM Fuel Injected Two Stroke
Monday, May 15, 2017 at 9:02PM EXC Battle Royale - Taddy Blazusiak versus Paul Bolton | KTM
Like the rest of people of Prince George, Andrew Forbes just wants a few days of warm sunny weather.
The biggest motocross event the city has ever hosted is now less that one month away and Forbes knows there's still plenty of work left to do to get Blackwater Motocross Park ready for the two-day CMRC Rockstar Energy Drink Motocross Nationals. That work becomes a lot more difficult when it's too wet.
"We've got equipment and manpower ready to go, we're just waiting for the rain to stop and hopefully that's going to happen within the next week," said Forbes, president of the Prince George Motocross Association. "We've got about two weeks of hard-at-it work to get the track and the facility ready."
Last fall and winter, the owner of Forbes Industrial Contracting brought in his own earthmoving equipment to widen the access road to the motocross track at 28100 Blackwater Road and clear a parking space big enough to handle the swarm of as many as 5,000 people who could show up for the national races, June 10-11. That rough work still needs to smoothed out and Forbes has been waiting for the frost to leave the ground to make that happen.
"I would say we've almost quadrupled the parking area, said Forbes. "The other major improvement was, in order to host a CMRC national event we had to have free and clear access for an ambulance to get in and out. Previously, our driveway in was a single-lane goat trail so if you met somebody halfway in, somebody had to back up. Now we've built a full two lanes of access road so you can meet anywhere and still get by."
The other phase of the project is bringing in new material for the motocross track itself. Built on clay, from the day the facility first opened in 1996, Blackwater has drawn notoriety for the poor drainage of its track in rainstorms. The dirt has to continually be reworked to prevent it from getting packed into a rock-hard surface.
The club has a received a grant from Northern Development Initiatives Trust to replace the existing dirt with sandy loam. To do that, at least 100 truckloads of material have to be moved using highway vehicles which will then be reloaded onto smaller tracks for the trip the hill to the track. Using a bulldozer and an excavator, the new dirt will then have to be worked into the existing soil and spread on the track.
Rain has plagued the Prince George Motocross Club the last three years, whenever it tried to put on a regional series race, turning the track 30 kilometres southwest of the city centre into a mudbog.
"If we can get it to stay there, it will do wonderful things for our track," said Forbes. "Historically, the problem with the Prince George Blackwater track is we spend a large amount of money to get the right dirt on the surface and the very next race we have monsoon-like conditions.
"Because we have clay underneath the sand, every time we get a heavy rain the water has no place to go and we've had to scrape that beautiful material off. The new material has to be worked into the clay and the longer it's worked in the better results we'll have."
White Spruce Enterprises has donated the sand and trucks and Forbes says several other contractors, including O'Brien Training, have donated time and equipment to the project. Before the race, workers will have to get hay bales, flagging and plastic protective fencing in place to protect the riders.
"It's a completely different event than what Prince George is used to holding, we're going to have a number of food vendors, a number of motorsports vendors selling their wares or promoting their businesses," said Forbes. "Prince George is used to hosting amateur races. This is a show and for spectators it's going to be an exciting event. This is going to dwarf anything that's ever happened in Prince George."
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