TOAD Talk: Dr. Seth Boyd

Good morning. I’m Dr. Boyd and like every faculty member I fill a variety of roles on campus. I teach a lot of English I classes and I’m the director of the SrEx program (seniors, you’ll be hearing from me soon!). But the title I am most excited about is one that doesn’t really exist – I made it up: I am the Keeper of the Goldmine.

 

Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Goldmine. 

 

Now, raise your hand if you’ve been to the Goldmine.

 

For those of you that aren’t familiar, the Goldmine isn’t an actual goldmine. It’s Thacher’s bike park. 

 

If you stand on the track and look at the scoreboard, to the right you’ll see a small path that  goes over the barranca to the top of Goldmine. There, you’ll find a flow trail, a pump track, and a skills loop. All told, there are 6 jumps, 14 berms, and 35 rollers – all designed and hand built by Thacher adults and students. It’s called the Goldmine because of the legend of an old mine on the part of campus.

 

Six years ago, the Goldmine didn’t exist. In 2017, the area was an impenetrable wall of brush and poison oak. And then two things happened. First, the Thomas Fire cleared out the brush and poison oak. A couple years after that, the pandemic hit. As classes moved to Zoom and the campus sat empty, my friend, mentor, and former colleague, Brian Pidduck, took a shovel and mcleod and started hacking away at a new trail. A few months later, he finished the main figure-8 loop and hung a sign from the oak tree at the top of the trail. That was the beginning.

 

When school started up again in the fall of 2020, a handful of students and I joined Mr. Pidduck. We’d meet during the afternoon or on the weekend and, with shovels and pickaxes, sculpt dirt. We’d build a jump or a berm, test it, move it, test it, and reshape it. None of us knew what we were doing, but we figured it out together. 

 

The iterating hasn’t stopped. Dozens of students have lent a hand in creating a Goldmine. One of my favorite things about the space is how I associate every feature with the students that helped build them. When I look at Jump #1, I think about the weekend that Augie Thorne built and re-built it three times. When I look at berm #2 on the pump track, I remember the afternoon Cody Lee and Ana Palacios moved about 30 wheelbarrows full of dirt to build it. When I look at the High Line and the long drop into Jump #6, I recall the week that Mateo Nix and Theo Lopez spent cutting the trail out of the hillside – and I remember how annoyed I was at Mateo for doing it barefoot.

 

The Goldmine also reflects the talent and dedication of our faculty and staff. When all of the features we built were threatened by an atmospheric river bearing down on Ojai, Mr. Luna brought in a front loader and re-directed the streambed. When we needed two bridges to traverse that streambed, Doc Q created the designs and directed the building teams. When I asked Doc Q to review my plans for a teeter totter on the skills loop, she kindly told me they absolutely would not work, and then suggested that she offer an x-block class where students could design and build it. Aided by Mr. Kyle’s carpentry skills, Doc Q and a group of students built what must be the finest bike teeter totter in all of California.

 

This past spring, Paige Fitzpatrick and I were shoveling dirt onto the berm that catches you after jump 5. She stopped digging, looked out over the Goldmine trails, and said, “I can’t wait to come back to campus after I graduate and see what has been added to the Goldmine.” Without thinking much, I told her that there wasn’t space for any more growth. Paige, in her sage-like manner, said, “We’ll see.” The next day, Darragh Mahoney and Charlie Parkes were digging out a landing spot so that the berm Paige and I had been building would be a jump, sending riders deeper down towards the barranca.

 

I believe that Thacher is a special place, and the fact that the Goldmine exists shows why. This community has come together to build something special, and I know it is going to continue because of the “Keepers of the Goldmine” that are sitting in the audience.

 

So, in closing, I invite you all to take a walk through the goldmine – and if you ever want to dig – or ride – let me know. And if you want to see some of your peers shredding it at the Goldmine, please check out the video that Sebastian Carr and David Thele produced for us. I’ll send the video out after assembly (embedded below).