Tales from the Outback

Throughout the past 6 months on the road, we'd always get a laugh when we told folks that we were wintering in Thunder Bay. Our final visit of the year was December 9th, in balmy Nanaimo, then AJ and I repacked the car one last time and did the four day drive back to Ontario. We're hibernating for the next few months, while we wait for spring and the trail building season to arrive. Meanwhile we have lots of time to catch up on office work, and couch surfing.

We had a great day of building and teaching in Nanaimo; tons of great volunteers ready to tackle the challenging terrain we had, plus help from the previous Trail Care Crew to supervise other sections of trail. The project consisted of about 150 metres of trail construction and rehabilitating older trail to bring up to sustainable guidelines.

Trail design can sometimes be a pretty complicated endeavour. One must balance many considerations when adding new trail to an existing network. This includes the basics like user types, difficulty level, existing trails, and the ever present question of sustainability. Furthermore, different types of terrain provide additional challenges; a beginner trail in rooty and rocky terrain can require significant effort.

It can take quite a while for an organization or club representing a group of people to become an established part of the community. Especially when the club has to work with both local or regional governments, and at the same time establish a membership base which can support the activities and long term goals. Furthermore, when an organization is just starting out, the list of obstacles and challenges is often much larger than the lists of successes.

For years, mountain bikers have had to tell land managers exactly what type of trail we like. For those who've never ridden a mountain bike, it would be reasonable to assume a wide doubletrack with gravel or wood chips is good enough. But anyone who has ridden a mountain bike knows the amount of fun that can be had on narrow and twisty singletrack.

Our most recent Trail Care Crew visit in Invermere, BC, was a great one; 29 participants came out to our Trail Building School, we collected record donations to the 2012 Trail Building Fund, and also had a great Club Care Workshop with almost twenty members from the Columbia Valley Cycling Society's board and executive.

The residents of Jasper, AB, are typical of most residents in mountain towns for their ability in the outdoors. Whether on bike, foot, or horseback, most would be quite at home on a back country expedition or on above alpine technical trails.

The summit was a great opportunity for some great minds in mountain biking to gather and share ideas on any topic under the sun: sustainable trail design, conservation, bicycle tourism and economic development, and trail advocacy. Of course, the town provided a great facility to hold a world class event with fantastic trails, great food, beautiful environment, and great people. The bar has been set higher yet again, can the 2014 summit possibly best this?