Booby trapped trails, rogue builders and environmental damage called out in open letter from North Shore Mountain Bike Association
Metro Vancouver is shutting down popular but unsanctioned mountain bike trails. The North Shore Mountain Bike Association is condemning rogue trail builders. Someone booby trapped Corkscrew, a longstanding sanctioned downhill run.NSMBA executive director Deanne Cote published an open letter this week acknowledging that in the woods of the North Shore, things are coming to a head.
But, Cote said, when people take matters into their own hands, it jeopardizes the environment, people’s safety and the future of their sport in Metro Vancouver’s jurisdiction. “We’re probably into 10, 15, 20 kilometres of unsanctioned trails,” she said. “ paralleling existing sanctioned trails that we’ve recently spent lots of money upgrading. They kind of spaghetti their way down the mountainside in multiple different directions.… We get to the point where it’s starting to get a little out of hand. The environmental damage starts to get quite dramatic and then we have to take some action and go in and shut down some of these unsanctioned trails.
The sanctioned trails, by contrast, have been carefully designed with drainage and root systems in mind and they get regular maintenance from the NSMBA’s army of volunteers to ensure their sustainability. Trail sabotaged More than damaging the environment and stepping on the toes of land managers like Metro, Cote said the reputation of the mountain bike community as a whole is suffering as the “one per cent” continue to blaze new trails without permission. There are still plenty of people, she cautioned, who are openly hostile to all mountain bikers and think the sport should be banned outright on wilderness trails.
Like the allure of fresh powder on a ski hill, many mountain bikers seek loam – the loose and forgiving soil that gives the best tactile experience when bombing down a hill. Metro Vancouver, though, has pre-emptively declared that, because it was built without permission, New Normal will be fully decommissioned and never added to the authorized trail network.
“You go ride your spot and you just keep it on the down-low, because otherwise it won’t be a good spot anymore because everything gets blown out, and that’s when things go wrong,” he said. “If you have 15 people going down a trail in the entire weekend, what is that really going to do?” “Metro has made it very clear that it is not a trail that is going to come within the sanctioned network at any given point. We recognize that that style of trail is absolutely required within our network,” Cote said.
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