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Going Big (part 1)

By Patrick Farrell High Country News On a bright blue-sky morning in June, the cinnamon-coloured hills of the Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, are just starting to heat up.
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Jacquie Phelan in the early days of mountain biking, during a 1985 race in China Camp State Park near San Rafael, California.

By Patrick Farrell

High Country News

On a bright blue-sky morning in June, the cinnamon-coloured hills of the Marin Headlands, north of the Golden Gate Bridge, are just starting to heat up. I’m pedaling hard to keep up with Jacquie Phelan as we climb up the backside of Mount Tamalpais. Phelan, a longtime bicycle advocate and former United States dirt-racing queen, is giving me an up-close and dusty tour of mountain-bike history.

Every greasy bike-shop kid in America knows the story of how "Mount Tam" gave birth to the mountain bike. Back in the mid-1970s, a pack of hippie bike riders salvaged old Schwinn paperboy bikes and retrofitted them for the mountain’s rough dirt roads. Mount Tam’s "Repack Hill" was the testing ground for the sport’s pioneers. Legend has it that the steep route got its name because riders had to repack their drum brakes with grease after each speedy run.

Phelan was one of the first women to join the Marin mountain-bike scene. In 1980, she took part in the annual Thanksgiving Day ride — the "Appetite Seminar" — on a girl’s 5-speed town-bike. She soldiered through it and was hooked. She started racing the next year, winning her first national championship in 1982. Phelan held her title until 1986 and continued racing well into the ’90s. Now 50 and a survivor of breast cancer, she is still an astounding climber, capable of putting this writer, 21 years her junior, to shame.

Phelan is out ahead of me, threading her wheels along the best line up the dusty hill. I call out and ask the name of the trail.

"Fire road," she says over her shoulder. "I’m really going to have teach you to say ‘fire road.’ This isn’t a trail."

The distinction has more to do with politics than with anything else. In Marin, nearly every narrow trail — "singletrack" in bike lingo — has been off-limits almost since Phelan started riding here. And therein lies the other side of the mountain bike’s creation story: With mountain biking was born a new kind of controversy on the trails, one that has only deepened today.

Surging up another steep, rocky road, Phelan tells me that the early riders never imagined that the sport would catch on the way it did. "We thought it was going to be the world’s biggest small sport," she says. But by the mid-’80s, the fire roads and trails on Mount Tam were jammed with cyclists. Soon other users were complaining that the bikers were destroying trails and scaring horses and walkers.

What followed became known as the "hiker-biker wars." Hikers and horseback riders denounced mountain bikers as reckless and rude thrill-seekers, and fought to ban them from the trails. Some bikers, in turn, labeled the un-wheeled "HOHAs," an acronym for "hateful old hiking association."

As complaints and confrontations mounted, the Marin Municipal Water District, which manages most of Mount Tam’s trails and fire roads, began cracking down. Rangers hung surveillance cameras in trees and used radar guns to clock bikers’ speeds. Phelan got two tickets for being on off-limits fire roads, and her husband got a speeding ticket for going 22 mph. Bikers still recall those "police state" days as if it were a real war: Cyclists worked under cover of dark, running illegal midnight singletrack rides.

By the late 1980s, the Marin fight was boiling over just as mountain biking was spreading up and down the West Coast and inland, to Moab, Boulder and Durango. The national media picked up on the story, casting mountain bikers as adrenaline-addled rebels. A 1987 Newsweek headline dubbed them "Two Wheel Terrors." Two years later, the Wall Street Journal blared, "A New Menace Lurks in the Wilds: Supersonic Cyclists."

In Marin, the hiker-biker wars peaked in 1993, when rangers discovered a secret trail that bikers had blazed illegally through the woods. Bikers called it the New Paradigm Trail, a protest, they said, against a system that wouldn’t take them seriously. But land managers, hikers and horseback riders saw the trail as proof that cyclists were out of control. That sentiment helped fuel a backlash against bikes.

Local mountain bike groups and the new International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) were in the midst of a lawsuit against the National Park Service, which had locked bikes off all singletrack and even some fire roads in the new Golden Gate Recreation Area. Ultimately, the Sierra Club joined the fight, siding with the Park Service. In 1994, not long after the bikers lost the case, the New Paradigm Trail was destroyed with much fanfare.

"I don’t know if we failed," says Phelan of the New Paradigm imbroglio, pausing at the old trailhead on a flat section of fire road. The experience spurred bikers to become more of a political force, she says. Nationwide, bikers have become aggressive trails advocates and savvy participants in the public process. Local bike clubs volunteer thousands of hours building multi-use trails, work with land managers to open trails, and field homegrown bike patrols to make sure their fellow cyclists are following the rules. In 2005, IMBA, which now boasts 32,000 members, patched up differences with the National Park Service, signing an agreement to introduce new mountain bike opportunities to parks across the country.

But despite the good intentions, mountain bikers can’t seem to shake their renegade image, especially in California. In Marin a few years ago, a leader of a local bike group was convicted of illegal trail building. Across the West, some riders build illegal trails and obstacles, and knowingly "poach" closed trails. A small body of scientific evidence suggests bike tires are no more damaging to trails than horse-hooves or hiking boots, but the technological advancements keep racing ahead, allowing bikers to go farther and faster, at times pummeling favorite trails.

Today, the "hiker-biker wars" are raging on an even grander scale, as a new generation of riders pushes the limits of what is possible on two wheels, and bikers fight for access to more trails. The issue comes to a head over the subject of wilderness.

The great wilderness debate

The 1964 Wilderness Act banned all forms of "mechanical transport" from designated wilderness areas. Bikes aren’t specifically mentioned, but land managers and many environmentalists argue that they’re obviously mechanical, and are simply incompatible with the "primitive recreation" experience that the law set out to protect.

If a bike is mechanical, so are oar-locks, ski bindings and even hiking poles, says Gary Sprung, who worked as IMBA’s communications director and national policy director until 2005. Keeping bikes out of wilderness is pure snobbery, he says: "There is a basic disdain for this form of transportation. It comes from this idea that hiking is saintly and the only way to go. They don’t understand that we can stop and smell flowers and feel the wind."

Sprung remembers the early days, before the crackdown, when riders rode free in wilderness areas like the West Elk Wilderness, above his hometown of Crested Butte, Colo. All that changed in 1984, when the Forest Service, the last of the federal agencies to respond to mountain bikes, banned them from all designated wilderness areas.

IMBA’s website states that mountain biking is "consistent with the values of Wilderness land protection," but the group has not pushed to allow mountain bikes in wilderness areas. Still, Sprung and former IMBA president Jim Hasenauer, two of the guiding intellectual forces behind IMBA’s wilderness stance, personally believe that bikes should be allowed into wilderness, though both agree that some areas are too sensitive for any humans to enter.

Although IMBA hasn’t pushed for access to existing wilderness, it has entered the debate over creating new wilderness areas, insisting that existing bike trails be left open, and that bike-friendly areas be designated nearby. And in the past two years, IMBA has come out swinging against Forest Service proposals to ban mountain bikes from areas the agency has recommended for wilderness protection in Idaho and Montana. "We have supported wilderness bills that have closed trails to mountain biking, and I know we will again in the future," says the group’s government affairs director, Jenn Dice. "Our position on every wilderness bill is that we want to get it to a place where we can support it."

But getting a bill to where IMBA can support it can be an excruciating experience, according to Dan Smuts, California regional director for The Wilderness Society. An avid cyclist who rides a mud-spattered Santa Cruz Blur to work, Smuts praises IMBA’s trail-building efforts, and believes that mountain bikers deserve a say in land-management decisions. But when it comes to wilderness, he says, they simply don’t belong.

Leaning over a pile of maps in his spartan San Francisco office, Smuts points to a line drawn around a proposed wilderness area near Donner Pass. California Sen. Barbara Boxer, D, included the area in a wilderness proposal she unveiled in 2003. "We moved the boundary to accommodate the Hole in the Wall Trail, knowing it was a very popular trail (for bikers)," he explains. Then he flips to another map of the Grouse Lakes and Castle Peaks areas. In return for keeping Hole in the Wall open, he says, IMBA agreed to give up access to these areas in order to protect them as wilderness.

But then, Smuts says, IMBA backpedaled, and requested that the land and a few trails be protected under a less stringent designation that would allow bikers access. Working with IMBA is "like negotiating with Jell-O," he says. "Nothing ever settles down."

During similar negotiations on a smaller California wilderness bill sponsored by Rep. Mike Thompson, D, IMBA demanded exemptions for one trail that had been off-limits to bikes for years, and another that was nothing more than un-ridable sand. The California office of The Wilderness Society eventually severed talks with IMBA, choosing instead to hammer out a compromise with local bike groups.

IMBA admits it reversed course on the Boxer wilderness negotiations. But the real problem, Dice believes, is that IMBA’s offers of other designations — like national scenic or recreation areas, which offer strict protections against industrial uses but still allow bikes — aren’t taken seriously, especially in California. Wilderness groups, she says, "see it as capital ‘W’ wilderness and everything else is over. So it’s really hard to talk with them about other designations."

Sprung, who was a longtime professional wilderness advocate before joining IMBA, sees bikers as a green group that just hasn’t been invited to join the party. "I think we would be a regular part of the conservation movement, but we don’t have the luxury because our political energy must be spent on defending our right to trails from hikers and environmentalists," he says.

Big bikes, big problems

But a lot has changed since the days when Gary Sprung and his buddies pedaled their early mountain bikes through the West Elk Wilderness. If Marin is the birthplace of mountain biking, then the North Shore of Vancouver in British Columbia is where the sport enjoyed its teenage years in the 1990s. From its steep root- and rock-studded trails came a new breed of bikers that changed the sport dramatically.

On private land like Grouse Mountain, and in British Columbia parks, bikers built log trellises and balance beams over boggy and otherwise un-ridable areas. Soon they were building elaborate "stunts" — wooden jumps, teeter-totters, even banked walls of lumber. They blended moves from skateboarding and BMX with traditional mountain biking, and called the new sport "freeriding."

Freeriders pushed the development of stronger bikes that could handle 8-foot drops and insanely steep hills. Many of these bikes now sport 8 to 12 inches of bump-absorbing swing-arms, coil springs and damping cartridges on both front and rear wheels. Equipped with super-stout wheels, big tires and hydraulic-disc brakes, some weigh more than 50 pounds — so much, in fact, that riding them uphill is next to impossible.

Ski areas now sell summer lift tickets to freeriding and "downhill" bikers. British Columbia’s Whistler Mountain Bike Park, freeriding’s top destination, has soared from 10,000 riders in 1999 to a projected 120,000 last year. California’s Northstar resort near Tahoe and Mammoth in Southern California both have freeriding courses, and at least six resorts in Colorado offer "lift-assistance riding." Skills parks, not unlike skateboard parks, are popping up in urban areas as well.

Freeriding is still a small part of the mountain bike scene, largely relegated to specialized playgrounds, but its burlier technology has trickled down. Nearly all high-quality mountain bikes now sport front suspension and disc brakes; most, lighter "cross-country" bikes, are "full-suspension," meaning they have both front and rear shocks. Today, even average riders can charge over obstacles at speeds unthinkable a decade ago.

Because of the speed — and the stealth — of the new bikes, Robert Eichstaedt, a member of the Marin Horse Council, no longer takes novice equestrians out on Marin’s roads. "In the early days, you could hear bikes coming. Now, what you hear is something rushing. For a horse, if they can’t see it, their instinct is to run." Just last year, a biker-equestrian encounter on a narrow trail in California’s Los Padres National Forest ended in a horse falling to its death.

Recently, the faster bikes have spurred some ski areas to clamp down. In 2004, after the death of one downhill racer and the severe injury of another, California’s Snow Summit resort area put the brakes on downhill bikes. Chairlift operators now check bikes to make sure that the suspension doesn’t top 6 inches, the tires are 2.5 inches in diameter or smaller, and the bikes don’t weigh more than 35 pounds.

But it was more than liability concerns that prompted the resort’s ban. Bikers had blazed a mess of illegal trails that careened into the national forest from the top of the lifts. "Guys were just riding everywhere in the woods," Snow Summit President Dick Kun told the cycling magazine VeloNews. "The Forest Service was really pissed off with what was going on, and it probably wasn’t long before they shut it down anyway."

In fact, as freeriding’s popularity has grown, guerilla trails and rickety ramps have sprouted on private and public land around the region, and the new speed and braking has rutted out favorite trails. Last summer, tempers flared when Forest Service officials tore out log-rides and other biker-made stunts on trails near Missoula, Mont., and threatened to issue $175 tickets to riders caught on a popular but technically off-limits trail.



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