Call to Arms | Trail Maintenance
"Trails are a living breathing thing."
Trails have good days and bad days, they need love, maintenance and care, just like we do. They don’t function properly without our help. Mountain bikes, winter snow melt, erosion and other factors all take their toll. Club Ride and Sun Valley are lucky to have a great trail association in our area called the Wood River Trails Coalition.
The Wood River Trail Coalition or WRTC is a 501c3 non-profit with one part-time director running the show. The WRTC advocates for all users in our area, not just mountain bikers, but hikers, horseback riders and motorcycle riders as well. They raise funds for trail crews that fall into a cost share agreement with the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Their goal for 2020 is to fund a 4-5 person trail crew in our area to work solely on trails with the intent of building more trails in the future.
The USFS and BLM trail crews work on 400+ miles of trail in the Wood River Valley. Knowing their challenges Club Ride is a corporate sponsor, helps fundraise, and our staff volunteer their time to both administrative duties, and join the local community getting our hands dirty working on trails.
All the staff at Club Ride are avid mountain bikers and most recently attended a Saturday work day on Forbidden Fruit. “The Fruit” as we like to call it is our only one direction flow bike trail. It was professionally built back in 2012 with the help of the USFS and our then trail association, the Wood River Bicycle Coalition. It is probably the most well-known mountain bike trail in our valley. The Strava leaderboard is full of world class riders with the likes of Russell Finsterwald, Ross Schnell and Kerry Warner. It has flow, berms, tabletops and pure speed. With all of that speed and traffic come issues. New riders to the area clamor to ride the best trails but of course don’t know the terrain. Each year brake bumps, drainage outlets, and debris need to be cleared and shaped. We worked along side 25 other locals raking, shoveling and cutting out downed trees to get the trail dialed. We finished with cold beers from our local Sawtooth Brewery and brats fresh off the grill. Our association’s motto holds true through and through,
"The trails don’t work unless you do."
