The Gateway Off-Road Cyclists Organization
Founded in 1998 by St. Charles area mountain bikers to help facilitate design and construction of a bicycle/hiking trail in a new County Park, the club has grown to the entire St. Louis metropolitan area in both Missouri and Illinois.
The Club:
Gateway Off-Road Cyclists (GORC) is a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation dedicated to advocacy, design, construction, and maintenance of multi-use trails. We are the St. Louis area’s only official International Mountain Bicycle Association (IMBA) affiliate club. As a club, we also have social activities such as group rides, trips, and events.
Advocacy:
GORC has established official relationships with St. Louis County Parks, St. Charles County Parks, St. Charles City, Missouri State Parks, Missouri Conservation Department, Southern Illinois University (Edwardsville), and the US Forest Service. With all of the above organizations, GORC's involvement includes trail design, construction, and maintenance, Technical Consulting, Leading Volunteer Workdays, and Providing Volunteers for Workdays.
Trail Work:
GORC, by the Fall of 2009, has been responsible for over 50 miles of new multi-use trail construction on public land in the St. Louis area; maintenance workdays have touched over 85 miles of trail in Eastern Missouri. In all cases, the trails were designed by GORC members, approved by the Park/Land Manager, and built with 100% volunteer labor. These efforts account for over 15,000 volunteer hours. Our average 4-hour workday attendance is approximately 25 people and we have 20 to 25 workdays per year.
Many GORC members have been trained extensively by the International Mountain Bike Association (IMBA) and have a great deal of experience in designing safe, sustainable, multi-use trail. IMBA’s design and construction standards include the latest techniques for avoiding and controlling erosion, which have been proven in the field year after year. More information on IMBA can be found at www.imba.com.
The GORC Mountain Bike Patrol
In January of 2007, 26 volunteer members of GORC founded our IMBA affiliated mountain bike patrol to take the next step in promoting singletrack trail advocacy. The primary goal of the patrol is to assist, educate, and inform all trail users, and to aid land managers in making the trails a better place to spend your outdoor time. Patrol members are trained in first-aid, CPR, minor on-trail bike maintenance, and proper trail etiquette. In the future patrollers will have the option to not be First Aid/CPR certified under the new Trail Ambassador program.
How Does GORC Help Me?
GORC is your single point resource for everything from simple assistance with trail maintenance, to 100% design and construction of new natural surface trails. Please call or e-mail gateway_mtb@yahoo.com for more information on how we can help you with your trails.
In striving to be an effective, respectable voice for local trail users, we stay active in our surrounding communities. When trail workdays are announced by a land agency such as St. Charles County Parks or St. Louis County Parks, we show up to help out. This not only allows us to directly improve a trail or repair a damaged one, but it shows the Park Departments that mountain bikers care about the trails they use and back it up with voluntary manual labor.
You may have ridden one of the fairly new trails we helped build such as Creve Coeur Park, Bangert Island, Indian Camp Creek, Broemmelsiek or several trails at Greensfelder Park. We're continuously working on new projects and can always use help. If you're interested in learning how to build/maintain trails, keeping trails open, and having fun, then we urge you to become a member.
