Nate Says:
The Drop. Very simply THE first stunt on the UH Trail. I remember while Sadie and I were building it on the second day, Tanabe and his wife were out walking the dogs. I could tell that he was very unsure whether or not to just tell us to stop. A few months later, he requested that we destroy it, just in case there was some kind of accident and the university held him liable. There is no longer a jump there, but we had great times riding 'the loop' round and round again, practicing our 5 foot drops.
It took a ton of work to build this thing, we lashed the logs together with banyan roots that we cut from a nearby tree, and had to clear and dig out the entire landing. This drop was unusable for 2 months however, when we discovered that the landing was the drainage for the entire hillside. Needless to say, durring the winter months there is 2 feet of water at the bottom of the landing.
Joel Says:
The drop was simply awesome. It was built by Nate and Sadie during their preternatural spurt of trail construction during Thanksgiving 2005 and it went through a few different iterations, with each new phase usually bringing the ramp up a bit to make it a little larger.
I have two favorite memories concerning the drop; the first was this one afternoon where Nate, Sadie, and I would ride the 'loop' hitting the drop each time around. The little loop we had established would bring you back around to the drop every 45 seconds or so and we must have hit it at least 30-40 times. My second most prominent memory concerning the drop was when Nate and I took Ryan Mason, my co-worker at Hilo Bike Hub to ride the trails at night. After riding the normal routes for a while we took him to the drop. Nate and I went off, as we already had many times before, and then Ryan made his first go. I remember standing there illuminating the drop with my headlight and watching Ryan coming flying off the drop, his front wheel immediately heading south as he left the ramp and his body rag-dolling until he smashed head first into the transition. He ended up landing in the disgusting pool of water laying in the low spot right after the drop. As if this wasn't bad enough Ryan insisted on doing it again and like the first time he wrecked, although not quite as dramatically. I got to give it to him though, hes got guts. Later upon telling my boss Chris about the ride he admonished me not to take Ryan out there again because he didn't want his mechanic injured. I think I said something along the lines of Ryan being capable of making his own choices, but oh well.
