Sacrifice Makes Beer Better

Everyone wants to ride, few want to build & maintain. Yet the world, my world anyway, is filled with seemingly endless miles of trail. I still haven't ridden everything within an hour's drive, and probably never will.

Guilty as the rest, I've moved far more dirt with my skidding rear tire than a shovel. That's why the trail-day sign at the top of Tyrolean Downhill last week gave me a feeling of crushing obligation. I ride there more than anywhere else, except maybe the illegals. It's the only downhill that ends near my place. And it gets hammered.

One of the new berms added to the Tyrolean Downhill trail on Memorial Day, 2013.

The shuttle is cake and, aside from a two-minute pedal halfway down, you hardly need the cranks for the four-plus miles of lightning fast downhill. Each summer it gets so much abuse that certain sections decay like Britney Spears did after losing her custody battle. A couple of the braking bumps have gotten so big you can double them (no joke, it's probably a 10-foot gap).

But anybody complaining about the condition can only blame themselves. Forest Service trails like these are lucky to get a few maintenance days a year from guess who? Local volunteers. Not the Forest Service. Us. It's our responsibility if we want them to stay intact, or improve.


About thirty people showed for this memorial day maintenance operation, and I was told that's the best turnout yet for Tyrolean. I was amazed by the quality and quantity of work that got done, especially with so many different personalities and opinions pinballing.

My group built about 50 feet of reroute, nearly all massive-boulder-reinforced berm, around a buzz-killing double chicane of flow-ruining pointlessness. Another group opened up an equally-large section of formerly weaving, baby-head-and-protruding-metal-stake-scattered, speed-murdering nonsense to a fast, flowing straightaway. And a third group built another needed berm in the off-camber-to-the-outside wasteland that used to connect the two. The whole zone is now much faster.

I thought this crew had the toughest job, but they finished first.

But I can already see people who didn't help complaining, because we really needed another day or a dozen more workers.

The plan was to have both majorly-reworked sections end with rock pops back into the steeper sections that follow, and a third rock pop, entering the first section, developed on the fly rather than using half the crew and a third of the day moving a sumo-sized boulder another two feet out of the way.

Due to the bureaucratic time constraints of such trail days, which are the only way to organize that many people and resources in a productive fashion, and the hours-consuming nature of building trail and berms to last, we came up short. Over our allotted time, we scrambled to finish the big berm and place boulders for the rock pops. The first popper needs another new berm before it in order to work, the location of the second ended up being too tight on the handlebars, the third just didn't happen and the big berm isn't perfect.

This spot needed more dirt for the berm to flow smoothly and we need more time, or people.

After so much effort, some riders will just see what would be way better, "had they been in charge". Not the miles hiked in and out, dozens of boulders moved and hours put in by people with full-time jobs, spouses and children. Elko, who spends his work days fixing other people's bikes and still takes his young daughters to the pump track instead of just riding with his buddies in his free time, also found time to get Forest Service approval, organize volunteers, get lunch donated for them and borrow a water sprayer from the fire department. Then he sacrificed his day off to work on the trail rather than ride it.

So if you, like me, are out there riding every day and joking or complaining about the braking bumps and what should be changed, think about sacrificing a day of riding next time you see that sign for a volunteer-trail-work day. The tri-tip burritos, hotdogs and beer all taste better when you get involved. Thanks to T's Mesquite Rotisserie and The Bike Shop @ Village Ski Loft for donating! And thanks to the Tahoe Area Mountain Biking Association, the Forest Service and everybody else who volunteered or helped make it happen.

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A tasty reward and all smiles after a long day of hard labor.

The ones who made it to the very end. Some of us even took a lap after this. Jordan took two. Photos by Robert Christensen.