Is B.C. Getting Soft?

The birthplace of gnar toes the line between its renegade beginnings and a sustainable future.

- Andrew Findlay

On a typical afternoon, I meet my homies at Fleen’s man cave before going for a rip on our local trails. It’s a form of therapy. I say “our trails,” not because we own them. In fact, nobody owns them; they are as legit as a politician’s campaign promise. This network is unofficially called ‘The Vortex.’ For the uninitiated, entering this nondescript rolling landscape of scrappy second-generation forest can feel as disorienting as stepping off an airplane into an unfamiliar country with a strange culture and language. The trails of The Vortex speak the language of my native mountain-biking tongue. Built by a small cadre of self-organizing trail builders without consent, this spiderweb of wiggly singletrack is the type of riding on which British Columbia built its mountain-biking pedigree.

“People have no idea what 30 years of free trail building did to develop mountain biking in B.C.,” Adrian Bostock, operations manager for the Salmon Arm-based Shuswap Trails Alliance, tells me in between sessions at last fall’s Mountain Bike Tourism Symposium in Whistler.

Mountain biking is aging in B.C. like a man in his 50s with a soft spare-tire and a muffin topping his chamois shorts. It can seem like serious business these days with committees focused on how to leverage trails into tourism dollars, building sustainable funding models and fabricating flow trails for toddlers.

Though it’s not ‘PC’ to admit this, I love the renegade and sometimes-naughty spirit of our sport. After all, the rogues are the ones who’ve always been out there pushing our sport like smart-ass teenagers with the motto: build first, ask for forgiveness later. If trail builders had to get sign-off from landowners or government bureaucrats every time they put shovel to dirt, we might all be still pedaling around Vancouver’s Stanley Park seawall. A land of bike paths.