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Swift, moving through the wilderness, courtesy of a mountain bike and a piece of infrastructure
known as the trail.
It started out as a happy accident, ancient utilitarian footpaths and single tracks which,
with their relatively ideal gradients, curves and surfaces, captured the imagination of
our sport and inspired us to hone our equipment and plan recreational escapades.
So inevitable now is this combination of vehicle and infrastructure, the wear esteemed
necessary or worthwhile, we even build new trails for purpose, mimicking or indeed amplifying
the sensation inadvertently provided by those primitive tracks.
Unfortunately as mountain bikers, we're often accused of being a destructive force, and
nobody can argue with the fact that, in many places, for various reasons relating to intensive
use, conflicts have arisen and are widespread, and questions over the practice of our sport
often find themselves at the centre of it all.
But what about the opposite of this?
What about the parts of the world rich enough in history to leave behind vast trail networks,
yet where a lack of use means that huge amounts of path have never seen bike tyres and never
even been trodden by anyone alive today?
These trails will eventually be taken back by the mountain, via one of several natural
means.
One alternative is to find them, reopen them, and advocate for sustainable use.
I had the good fortune of this activity being my job for quite a while, I get quizzed a
lot about transference, I always have and that's okay, I'm comfortable talking about
it.
Outside of family, it's essentially all I've known for the past decade.
For sure the most commonly asked question, especially after a day out on the hill, is
how do you find all these trails?
It's a question I've always appreciated because it appears to be an acknowledgement of what
I've always tried to do.
Constantly find and open fresh terrain and provide a live adventure into the unknown,
even for those people who return to race our event year on year.
But it's not a question that's easy to answer, not in words alone.
Well then that's 800 done, 200 to go, there isn't really any kind of predetermined step
by step procedure to this, it's more of a cyclical, iterative process, which is just
centered around finding that glue, that one awesome trail around which the whole day can
be based really.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Not every day goes as planned, if indeed the plan was to find great terrain, but sometimes
one needs to be more philosophical, because realistically, the plan has to simply be to
accrue knowledge without any major mishaps.
If at the end of the day on the hill, you know more than you did 24 hours ago, and you've
scratched a few itches of curiosity, then you have taken a step in the right direction
and enhanced your ability to put together a day worth riding.
Given enough time, enough terrain touched by history, and a little bit of patience and
tenacity, it becomes impossible not to happen upon the good stuff at some point.
The approach trail, there's any indication of what this next bit's going to be like,
but we're in for a bit of a treat.
Open-minded scouting is a vital phase in determining the lay of the land, but to progress in the
bigger picture of pioneering a long-distance mountain bike by Tim Rury, eventually a more
structured approach is going to be needed.
A journey by trails requires the existence of a certain type of trail to allow the journey
to be a genuine one, and therefore, when the loops of excitement die down, careful consideration
of the geometry of the terrain and a stringent vetting process will be required.
