Who Rules The Trails?

It’s not really about who thinks they rule the trails.

It’s about the little bits of bike we all leave behind. It’s about the side of the tree with scrapes from the multitude of bikers who couldn’t see the towering thing and hit it with a handlebar. It’s about the plastic bottle wedged in a gopher hole.

Not even about the best athletes, or the stamina, or endurance, or the ones with balance, the point is about Nature’s balance, so it’s about and around and circumscribed on the need to leave nature with less damage, more care.

A singletrack should stay single.

The beauty of mountain biking is to have some exhilarating activity in a remote setting. While the remoteness may vary, the beauty should not, and so I send this plea into the wild webs: take care of the trails.

With that pleading, I offer this promise: if you take care of the trails, you will be the one who rules them.

There really is no doubt in my mind. The ones who keep the trails pristine are the ones who rule. Those who pick up litter when they see it, and don’t leave any litter of their own, are kings and queens of higher order.

There is ease in not doing upkeep. There is leisure in not repairing things when you see them broken, or even when you break them. Don’t be the one who rides past and says to himself, or herself, “Someone else will fix it.”

It’s fine if you don’t have the tools on hand at that very moment and you need to come back later. So long as you do. After all, not everyone rides around with a chainsaw on their back.

The answer to the old riddle, “If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?” is “Yes, it makes a sound that every true mountain biker hears, and when they hear it, they stop whatever they’re doing and worry out loud, ‘Oh no, there’s a trail blockage somewhere.'”

It’s awesome to witness, like watching Obi-Wan Kenobi sensing the force.

One last item is this: those who go out to do some trail grooming, not with gas-powered tractors, but with picks and shovels, axes and machetes, well those are my heroes. They sacrifice perfectly good riding hours to put in some work hours. They make the trails clear enough for a two-wheeled traveler to pass. They put the dead wood back in the forest where it belongs.

Thanks be to them, the true rulers of the trails.