It’s never easy to visualize a bureaucracy.
Some things are just too vast to imagine, especially when they come swaddled in
grey and armed to the shirt collar with staplers and paperwork. The whole
concept is even harder to imagine in a rainforest. There’s something wild about
all those chuckling creeks, slouching ferns and towering trees, something that
seems diametrically opposed to the whole notion of regulation. That’s probably
why rogue trail builders have long been able to engineer mountain bike tracks
with little rub-up against the public or any other stakeholder, even if the
tradition contravenes the Forest and Range Practices Act — which it does.
And yet, the Western Canada Mountain Bike
Tourism Association (WCMBTA) tallied $8.2 million in non-resident spending
between the months of June and September, 2006 — all of it related to
mountain biking in Whistler and Squamish. Include the trail systems along the
North Shore, and that figure rises by another $2 million. Visitors to Whistler
doled out $6.6 million of the total, while Squamish accounted for $1.7 million.
These expenditures produced 194 corridor jobs worth $6.3 million in wages. Based
on the same WCMBTA report, over 25,000 different riders were counted on
Whistler’s valley trails, while 8,910 were pegged in Squamish. Along the North
Shore, 18,660 riders were recorded.
Yes, the rogue days are coming to an end, and
Barry McLane’s okay with that. At 22 years old, he’s been pumping pedals since
he was 10. A downhill director with the Squamish Off Road Cycling Association
(SORCA), he’s built three or four trails from scratch and maintained many more.
Along with SORCA trails director Chris McCrum,
McLane spent last week working for CMCC Contracting in the Diamond Head bush,
first surveying a new trail and then doing some preliminary cuts. The hope is
that this will be the first trail to earn official recognition under the B.C.
Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts (MOTCA)’s trails management strategy.
According to the WCMBTA economic impact report, Squamish could gain
considerable financial ground if it officiates its trail system.
“It’s pretty rad that they finally stepped
up,” McLane said. “The district (of Squamish) pours tons of money into
advertising the outdoor recreation lifestyle. But the district hasn’t put their
money where their mouth is. MOTCA has.”
The strategy has been in the works since 2006.
The motive is multi-pronged, with safety and management figuring high on the
list of reasons. Under the policy, recreation officers will be tasked with
evaluating existing trails and assessing plans for new ones. According to a
policy draft, MOTCA will avail itself to grant applications to cover the costs
of new trails, even as grassroots committees scour the funding landscape for
other opportunities. This all factors into the province’s goal of doubling
tourism by 2015.
Squamish is one of seven B.C. communities
chosen to pilot the new policy. Should the CMCC trail gain approval, MOTCA will
pony up $50,000 for the work, funnelling the money through the district, which
takes an administration fee, said McLane. As with all trails under the policy,
consultations with First Nations and environmental stakeholders have to take
place before the decision can be made official.
“The theme of the trail is really fast and
really smooth,” McLane said. “This is like traffic management, this trail. It’s
meant to traverse the area and catch the other trails.”
Sustainability is a high priority. According
to McLane, you could drop $50,000 on creation, but do it poorly, with no mind
for erosion, and then have to spend $10,000 every season on upkeep.
“So what we look for is a slope between five
and seven degrees, ideally, with lots of grade reversals, which is lots of ups
and downs. That way, water doesn’t stay on the trail, which is the biggest
cause of erosion.”
McLane expects a decision on the trail to come
down within the next two weeks. The trail hasn’t been named yet, and CMCC is
considering a contest to come up with a moniker.
But not everyone is as positive as McLane.
Cliff Miller is the vice president of SORCA, as well as the director for Test
of Metal. Miller remembers the consultation phase of the policy’s development,
which took place a couple years ago. As far as the ministry’s safety agenda is
concerned, technical trail features (TTFs), which are any kind of stunt ride
modification, are cause for concern — and so $2 million in third party insurance
will be required where those features come into play.
“That was the deal breaker for us,” he said,
remembering how SORCA walked away from negotiations in frustration. “The
analogy is you don’t go to minor hockey and ask minor hockey to pick up the
entire liability for every single user.”
But the Squamish-Lillooet Regional District
(SLRD) has entered into an agreement with the province under the auspices of
Corridor Trails Program. Thanks to the Municipal Insurance Association, they’ll
be footing the $2 million insurance bill on behalf of the cycling
organizations. The partnership will also see the province work with the SLRD to
maintain official trails, and the latter government is working on a trails
directory.
While Miller welcomes a degree of government involvement,
he does worry over the fate of existing trails with technical trail features.
“Well, that’s the big problem,” he said. “They
said to the clubs, you can choose five trails. They may get grandfather
(clauses).”
If anyone knows about the danger of TTFs, it’d
be Squamish rider Dave Finn. A couple years ago, while riding a local trail, he
injured himself on a dirt jump, breaking his hip and ending up in a wheelchair.
He was out of commission for eight months.
Just the same, Finn insists there’s an unspoken
code among riders, and it’s the same sort of ethos practiced by skateboarders:
If you hurt yourself, you hurt yourself; it’s no one’s fault but your own. To
litigate is to betray the culture itself. Further, Finn had ridden that same
line hundreds of times without incident. You roll the dice often enough, and
you’re bound to lose the odd round. That’s a fact of the sport.
The Ontario-born Finn, who has done some rogue
building and maintenance throughout his years in Squamish, sees a plus to the
MOTCA policy.
“I think to some degree it’s a really good
policy,” he said, “just because lately there’s been a lot of people going off.
And some of the stuff that’s being built is excessive in terms of environmental
footprints and stuff like that. But I think it’ll put a cap on a lot of the new
trails that are popping up.”
As for the potential for closures of old
favourites?
“Obviously that’s a bummer when you lose a
trail,” he said. “There’s a lot of different points to that. One is it spreads
out riders. If you have just one trail, you’ll have a lot more people on that
trail, so there’d be a lot more erosion and shuttles up Diamond Head and stuff
like that. The bigger networks disperse the riders. On the weekends, it’s
phenomenal the amount of people coming up from the city to ride Squamish. It’s
impressive.”
When it comes to TTFs, McLane views them as
something of an overblown focal point. The attention they gather is due mainly
to their appearance, which can be intimidating. But responsible riders will
walk the trail and scope their lines, just as skiers and snowboarders do when
exploring new terrain on the mountain. The MOTCA policy document calls for
signage denoting difficulty at the mouth of all trails and would like to see
the first set of TTFs established within view of the trailhead, a system that
allows novice riders to assess their commitment to the drop in.
“There’s a lot of focus on TTFs because they
look dangerous,” McLane said. “But there’s an inherent risk as soon as you
touch the dirt.”
While McLane’s work on the Diamond Head trails
is a paid gig, volunteers propel the more common Squamish trail building and
maintenance scenario. In Whistler, paid staff working for the municipality
build the trails
on municipal land
. And, while
the Whistler Off Road Cycling Association does rely partly on volunteers, it
also has the fundraising capacity to pay some of its builders.
McLane hopes the MOTCA policy will prompt the
District of Squamish to chip in financially. He’d also like to see portions of
the amenity packages pledged by developers go towards trail building and
maintenance.
“That’s actually an awesome point,” agreed
Finn. “It’s frustrating about this area. It seems to be so focused on
development, development that it’s focusing its resources away from (recreation).
They call themselves the recreational capital of the world, but they don’t
spend the money to push the area. At the same point, for years they only news
you’d hear would be about cross country trails, so, for a lot of free riders,
that’s why all these rogue builders came along.”
Despite the discrepancy in funding across the corridor, mountain biking is prominently positioned in Sea to Sky tourist marketing, and, given the numbers survey by WCMBTA, the result is the nascent posturing of a bona fide industry. And this, after all, is the first world; seldom do you have industry without bureaucracy. While a bureau of the bush may seem counterintuitive, the general feeling in the mountain bike community is that a democratically designed and
