Is it time for mountain biking to put on its big boy pants?

Mountain biking, as a sport and recreational endeavor, isn't very old.  Depending on how you define the moment mountain biking was born, mountain biking is around 40 years old.  In those 40 years, we’ve gone from cobbled together rigid bikes to bikes able climb to and descend on nearly every terrain available.  We’ve gone from a group of hippies to one of the fastest growing sports for high school kids.

There is a lot to be proud of.
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But we have brought some baggage with us that, much like disco and sex in a van with an airbrushed desert scene, is better left behind.  What could that be?  It’s simple: illegal trail building and trail riding.

​A little history

Before we go too far, we have to talk about how we got here with a little history.  When the first commercial mountain bikes appeared, riders did what they did since they were kids: took the bikes into the woods to ride them.  There was no Trailforks or social media or any other way of knowing where bikes could be ridden, the rules of the trail or anything related.

The results of unbridled excitement without any expectations of actions had the predictable result.  In some areas trails started showing wear and tear.  There some less than impressive hiker-biker interactions.  Many “traditional” users found these new additions to their trails to be scary and hard to understand.  These issues quickly morphed into a new movement, starting in Marin County, California, of banning bikes from trails.

For large parts of the country, as these bans spread in the late 1980s and early 1990s, no legal riding existed.  The only recourse was to ride trails that you didn’t have permission to ride.  This act, known as “poaching”, was the only way to ride a bike on a trail.  As these bans became more rigid and better enforced, a new phase started: building secret/unauthorized/illegal trails.

For most of the 1990s this was the norm of being a mountain biker.  You just rode illegally and if needed, built illegal trails.  It was just part of what came with the territory.

​The slow wave

These bans, especially in California, birthed a reaction.  In 1988 a new advocacy organization was formed:  the International Mountain Biking Association (IMBA).  IMBA was formed from five organizations combined:  Concerned Off Road Bicyclists Association, Bicycle Trails Council of the East Bay, Bicycle Trails Council of Marin, Sacramento Rough Riders and Responsible Organized Mountain Pedalers.  Through the 1990s IMBA created many of the things we take for granted: the rules of the trail, the beginnings of sustainable trail construction techniques and Trail Care Crews to teach construction techniques.

However, something else odd happened.  In the middle and south of America, the trail bans never came.  These locations had a long tradition of sharing trails and lands between users and largely just accepted mountain biking as another use.  The result was an explosion of legal riding in parts of middle America.  In 1996, mountain biking was added as an allowed use in the James River Trail system.  In 2001 the beginnings of the trail networks at the Knoxville Urban Wilderness and Lebanon Hills Regional Park where started.  Together, both these locations birthed modern urban mountain biking and added a new type of place to ride even closer to home.  Minnesota, Wisconsin and Tennessee were to create many of what we call “user management techniques”.  While it seems strange to say, some states that are thought of as “flyover country” now have more numerous, and  arguably better,  mountain biking than the birthplace of mountain biking, California.

Speeding up this growth was the understanding of how to build good trails.  While old Civil Conservation Corps books had been used by trail builders for years, in 2004 a new book arrived: Trail Solutions by IMBA.  In 2007 the United States Forest Service adopted all of IMBA’s trail building techniques as their own.  Since nearly every state uses USFS guidelines as the basis of their own, suddenly mountain biking was built into trail guidelines by default.  The same year, Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources released their trail building guideline.  This guideline is considered so good that many states, like Massachusetts, just defer to it and stopped creating trail guides of their own.
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In less than 20 years, a wave of legal trails came to many places.  As spring thaws large parts of the country, “silly season” is here with new trails being greenlit and construction is starting on dozens, if not hundreds, of trails across the country.

​Ghosts of mountain biking past

But recently, the “silly season” has included more than announcements of new trails.  Its included disturbing stories of illegal trail building and riding.  Just a few:

Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park, Indiana – Two mountain bikers, both in their 50s, one a former Hoosier Mountain Biking Association board member, were arrested after building an illegal trail through the middle of a nature preserve.

Durango, Colorado – The Bureau of Land Management has been fighting a guerrilla war with riders that are riding trails closed for ecological reasons.  On top of this, there has been an increase in illegal trail building.

Elizabethtown, New Jersey – Last year a well-designed proposed trail system in the Watchtung Reservation was rejected by county administrators after adding it to the Master Plan.  Why?  Anti-mountain biking citizens could show Strava data and photos of illegal riding.  When the attempt was made this year to restart that stalled process, it was rejected.

It’s easy to assume all these places are the next anti-mountain biking capitol, but you would be wrong.  

Fort Benjamin Harrison State Park is home to a really fun trail that was built with the permission of the Indiana DNR.  The organization that builds and maintains the trails in Durango, Trails2000, is literally the poster child of how to build and maintain trails for all users.  That organization has been used as the template for other successful trail building organizations across the country.  Jersey Off Road Bicycle Association may not have trails near Elizabethtown, but they have an amazing reputation both within the state and nationally.  Their work at Allaire State Park is the very model of good park management.

What the heck is happening here?  In none of these places are there blanket bans or a lack in mountain biking.  Some, like Durango, literally have hundreds of miles of legal, amazingly built and maintained trails to ride.  So why the illegal trail building and riding?

The simple answer is that people got impatient or worse, continue to think that to be a mountain biker, you have to poach or build trails without permission.  While readers from a few places in the country might disagree, illegal riding is just a ghost of mountain biking past.  And a ghost that will cost us everything we have built if we don't perform an exorcism... and soon.

Here is the thing: we can debate the specifics of each one of these cases cited above.  We can “yeah but…” our way into any manner of logical conundrums.  But we can’t argue the downstream effects the actions of some are having on continued mountain biking access as a whole.  Pretend you are president of Trails2000 or the Hoosier Mountain Biking Association and you are talking to a land manager trying to get legal access to build a trail.  What do you say when asked about this illegal trail building?  Could you guarantee that Captain Narcissus won’t ride a trail when its closed or build a trail thru an area you aren’t supposed to go?

If we claim we are a good and healthy sport, if we claim someone’s son or daughter should join this sport in middle or high school, then what are we doing in giving “yeah but…” excuses for trespassing and destruction of public property?  It’s wrong.    It may be public land, but public land isn't a free-for-all, it belongs  to all of us and we have created government units to manage that land  for us as a collective.

If you ride trails illegally or build illegal trails, you aren’t going to that special section of Hell for Nazis, pedophiles and e-MTB owners.  However, the idea of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is made doubly powerful when the “others” is a collective and not individual.  There are all sorts of ways we have boundaries in our conduct because we understand that for society to function we have to control our behavior in some way.  Why do some mountain bikers view their neighbor’s property and the park down the road differently?  You wouldn’t dig up your neighbor’s yard or pop into his house when he isn’t home and drink his beer.  So why do that (in a sense) to the local park?  It is as much your neighbor’s as his yard and his house.

Possibly  this situation worse is a cadre of “professional” mountain bike writers waxing poetically about building and riding illegally.  They speak of illegal riding and illegal trail building in with a type of nostalgia, claiming it gets back to "the roots" of mountain biking.   Nostalgia is fun, but it’s often a myth.  Reading about knights and princesses is a great escape, till you remember it was an insanely violent time, where people died in horrible ways, smelled like a barn 24/7 and had few teeth.  What about when the mountain biking was on the “down low” and we rocked it like rebels?  Yeah, poor flowing trails hacked out in the woods that fell apart after the first rain.  Digging all summer long for a mile of two of trail.  Rickety features had even chances of falling over or getting you airborne.  Hiding from land owners or the police in a pile of poison ivy or sticker bushes.

Compare that to trails today.  Maybe it takes a few years and a pagan sacrifice to get permission from your local town, county, state or the BLM, but the time is worth it.  You get trails made for fun, where you can wave at fellow users vs. wondering if they are going to call in the rangers.  They flow pretty good and require little maintenance whether your weather is like Portland or Phoenix.  The features are built to last a lifetime will all the right radi and angles to do exactly what was intended.  And say what you want about machine building, but it sure is nice to get 15 miles of trail in a summer versus one or two.

Certainly, someone is about to fire off an email about where they live and say they must ride illegal because there aren’t trails or their local representatives are total sticks in the mud.  Let’s ask the $10,000 question here: how is that working out for you?  Has all that illegal riding or building gotten you new trails faster?    Have those representatives suddenly decided to give the go ahead on dozens, if not hundreds of miles of trails?
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The more important question though is this:  How is your illegal riding and trail building working out for your fellow mountain bikers?  Let’s use the examples above.  How many new mountain bike trails do think you aren’t happening in Indiana because of the actions of a few?  In Durango?  In Elizabethtown?  What about outside those locations.    Right now, somewhere in the United States a club is seeing their access stalled or denied  because when decision makers look, they find evidence of illegal riding or trail building, whether locally or in news stories like these.

Some of you were conceived in one of these. That doesn't mean its a modern vehicle that we should all have.

​Let’s put on our big boy pants

Part of growing up from a kid to an adult is learning patience and working toward a goal.  What seemed like forever when you are 5 is hardly any time when you are 25.  Even if the goal will take years, like college or beginnings of a new job, we understand the effort will have results.
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Well, maybe mountain biking as a sport and some mountain bikers need to grow up.  If we want to be treated like adults, we should start acting like it.  Adults are patient.  They work toward goals in a deliberate manner.    They work at addressing problems or using the power  of persuasion to convince others to help them change  the situation.    They don't be like, "Working with land managers is hard,"  go  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and head off to hack some trails out in the local park.  ​

We have the chance, now, to make a choice.    To realize that its time to move on from the days of illegal riding and illegal building.    And some of what made mountain biking culture must be sacrificed if our future access is to be guaranteed.  It won’t be easy.  It means becoming something different and more difficult and more patient than we have ever been.  It means thinking of the greater good and the long term good versus the itch to ride.

Because in the final analysis, if we want to keep what we have worked hard to achieve with mountain biking, we need to prove we are adults that land managers can count on.  Not spoiled children who sneak cookies out of the jar after being told 'to wait till after supper'.  In other words, its time to put on our big boy pants.