Phillip Barron
The Herald Sun
DURHAM — Many mountain bikers pick up the sport as another way to spend time in the woods. But not all trails let an environmentally conscious rider enjoy the ride.
Improperly built trails soon develop deep ruts in the ground and can damage sensitive vegetation, especially if those trails are carved through low-lying areas that stay wet. Perhaps worse are the poorly constructed stunt zones where deep holes are dug or wooden structures are built hastily. If built of untreated lumber, these structures quickly rot becoming both neighborhood blight and safety hazards.
Trails like these exist in the Triangle, though they are usually pirated trails with quasi-legal status. If you ride much in the area, you know which ones I’m talking about.
It doesn’t have to be this way; mountain biking and environmental protection go hand in hand. Since the so-called Park City Agreement in 1994 with the International Mountain Biking Association (IMBA), the Sierra Club has recognized mountain biking as a positive, worthwhile outdoor activity. Raleigh resident Bill Camp sums it up best — “mountain biking is a good way for families to spend time together participating in a healthy activity together.”
Building environmentally sustainable mountain bike trails is not only possible; through organized education efforts, it’s quickly become preferable. Car-manufacturer Subaru and IMBA co-sponsor two Trail Care Crew teams who annually travel the country preaching the gospel of sustainable trails. Their Trailbuilding Schools have taught more than 150,000 people how to build trails right the first time so that they’ll last forever.
Jill Van Winkle and Chris Bernhardt, IMBA’s east coast Trail Care Crew visited the Triangle in March 2005. The class was packed with volunteers, land managers, and park officials all hungry to learn how to build trails that will withstand the impact of the growing sport. At the end of the weekend, Bernhardt said he was impressed by the local commitment to sustainable trail-building, specifically Durham’s Little River Regional Park’s singletrack.
Well-built trails draw people to them. The more fat tires turn out on trails, more people will be there to protect wooded areas from development. Unsustainable development, here in the Southeast, is the single largest earth-scarring activity. Our fetish for new strip-malls anchored by big-box retail chains has meant the demise of many favorite homegrown trail systems.
The leadership of the Triangle Off Road Cyclists (TORC) is keenly aware that sprawl threatens access to local trials. “That’s one of the reasons TORC was formed,” says Camp, who is president of the advocacy group. Through fun events like last month’s Fat Tire Festival, Camp hopes to “raise awareness of our trails advocacy and volunteer efforts to build and maintain legal singletrack in the Triangle area.”
TORC has its work cut out. Right now, sights are set on new trails – conceived through memoranda of understanding with the landowners and built by volunteers — from northern Wake County down to Chatham County. Thanks to TORC’s lobbying efforts, developers’ masterplans already include singletrack options at the city of Raleigh’s new Forest Ridge park as well as the new park to be developed after the North Wake Landfill closes.
The Briar Chapel subdivision in northern Chatham County is a model for developer/volunteer collaboration. By the time the first houses in the new subdivision go up for sale, the publicly accessible singletrack TORC is building also should be open for business.
In local and regional media outlets, TORC has received flattering media attention for its efforts to preserve established trail systems and grow new ones in a region of North Carolina where sprawl is the norm.
And mountain bikers are generally good stewards of the land. I know of no other sport (organized or otherwise) where the participants take on lobbying for, building, and maintaining their own recreational outlets with the same fervor and tenacity as mountain bikers. Since its inception in 1988, IMBA’s members have registered more than 1 million volunteer hours of trail work. Heck, every land manager I’ve ever met says that mountain bikers out-do all other volunteers when it comes to time spent with a McLeod rake or Pulaski in hand.
Park officials at Beaverdam State Park, Lake Crabtree County Park, and Harris Lake county Park say that on occasion mountain bikers have broken the rules and ridden closed trails but that it hasn’t become a problem. Cyclists respect the trails, says Drew Cade, Park Manager at Lake Crabtree.
Even when a vocal minority of environmentalists try to claim that mountain bikers are harmful to the trails, science is on the side of the cyclists. IMBA has gathered on its website an impressive array of independent scientific studies of the environmental effects of mountain biking, all of which reach the conclusion that mountain biking makes no more of an impact on the natural environment than hiking, horseback riding, or other recreational trail activities.
With the right priorities, including a TORC membership card in your pocket, you can ride local trails knowing that you’re doing it in the greenest way.
Now, if only we could grow our greenway and bike-lane infrastructure at the same pace, we could ride to trail-head and leave the car behind. But that’s another story.
