I’ve been thinking about trail days. And I’m scanning this through the lens of my own selfish past. I hate to admit it, but in my 20s and 30s I didn’t do a single trail day. Not one. I was part of a group in Memphis that didn’t often do a trail day, but they generally did two or three each summer. I’m embarrassed that I often rode when they were busy weed whacking or chopping back brush.
Memphis has about as much in common with a jungle as I do a Russian oligarch, but there are places where the brush has to be cut back otherwise the trail can disappear inside of 90 days, so there was a need.
Fast-forward a few years and I’m a member of a club that requires everyone to do at least one trail day each year. We will have anywhere from half a dozen to 10 trail days each year. We don’t have more because we generally can’t do any during the wet season from some time in November until April.
To even be considered for membership, you need to get to know a member and have them bring you to a trail day. I love that feature of the club. Here are but a few of the benefits of trails days that I didn’t appreciate as a younger man:
- You get to know people. I’m not a misanthrope, okay, sometimes I am, but I’m definitely an introvert and it’s easy for me to keep to myself and not socialize. Trail days have helped me get to know some of our club members and they are uniformly great people.
- There’s a lovely sense of respecting the social contract, of contributing your part, when you do a trail day.
- There’s a remarkable sense of accomplishment and ownership when you ride on a trail that you helped cut. The first time is a wonderful surprise, but I’ve found that no matter how many times I ride a stretch of trail I helped cut my sense of pride in the work I did always flickers as I roll through.
- You’re apt to learn more about the history of riding in that area.
This last one might be peculiar to me; I didn’t grow up in Sonoma County, so much of the history of mountain biking there was established before I even moved to California. As we carpool into the area where we will work, I make a point of it to ride in the club president’s truck. I’ve learned a lot about the community of Occidental and the sorts of tensions that exist between families that have lived next to each other for five or six generations.
I don’t normally go in for gossip, but I do indulge in any West County gossip I might encounter.
I mention all this for its seemingly apparent truth, but also because we are starting to see many places cut new trail for mountain biking, sometimes even one-way trails that are bermed into perfect flow hacks.
I encourage everyone to get out there; swing a rogue hoe or a McLeod some.