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I haven’t ridden Greensfelder for a couple of months so I figured I’d better get out there and check it out before it rains. With work not pushing me into the late-evening hours today and the weather being as sweet as it is I had to go. Plus, I wanted to check out the maintenance and reroute progress.

Both St. Charles and St. Louis County Parks are making active efforts to educate trail users about how much of an effect they have on trails if they ride them when they’re wet. The signs are in all of the kiosks at St. Charles County Parks, and have also been installed at Chubb and Greensfelder.

Twelve of the GORC crew headed east for a weekend of riding the fast, flowy trails of Brown County State Park near Nashville, Indiana. Tom, Mari, Scott, Marvin, John, Bryan, Steph, Rob, Matt, Lisa, Josh and Valerie represented St. Louis in fine fashion and had quite the time jumping trail rollers, getting sideways on the many berms and balancing over some bridge skinnies. It’s safe to say that Brown County is one of the top midwestern biking destinations.

I don’t really remember much about Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” and I’m pretty sure my bike wasn’t mentioned in it, but it probably should have been. Yeah, so maybe I’ve packed on a little beer weight lately. Perhaps so much so that if my ride of choice had been a horse (*scoff!*) he would have Christopher Reeve’d me long ago and trotted off into the muddy, post-holed sunset (and left big piles of fly-covered poop all over said sunset scene, but I digress).

Another Midwest Mountain Bike Festival has come and gone. Hands down, this one gets the crown for best beer, with a choice of fine brews from Founders, Arcadia and Bell’s. The welcome party got started Thursday night with the roasting of a 137 lb pig, and some other very nice food, complemented by a keg of Founders Double Trouble and another of their Pale Ale. Very nice indeed.

This year’s Midwest Mountain Bike Summit (apparently they didn’t like GORC renaming it to a Festival), is going to be held in Grand Rapids, Michigan on May 29th-31st. For those of you who haven’t been to one, or don’t know its history, the Summit/Festival got started in Kansas City, then came to St. Louis for 2 years, and then was in Peoria, IL for the next 2 years. This is the first of 2 for Michigan.

Now that we know about the origins of mountain biking in Marin County in the 70’s, what about right here in Missouri? Ok, so they were about 10 years later, but Glenn Meyer has some interesting pictures of him and his riding buddies in the late ’80s. Here’s a link to a posting from 3 years ago that has a few pictures. I’m still waiting for him to find his pictures of Chubb from back then, so we can see what that trail looked like.

Trail workdays are a great way to meet people, give back to the community and learn more about the hows, whys, and whos of trailbuilding. While I’m not a master trailbuilder I have learned quite a bit of things over the years donating countless hours of volunteer time to keep St. Louis’ trail systems in good shape through maintenance, reroutes and expansion.

This is a documentary by Billy Savage that recounts the pioneering days of mountain biking. I bought it on a whim at the Alpine Shop just after Christmas and finally got around to watching it. Originally purchased as “motivation” during longer trainer sessions, it never made it to the basement as I’m unfamiliar with long (over 60 minutes, are you kidding??) indoor training sessions. Too hard, too boring.

GORC conquered the 62 mile Ouachita Challenge yet again. This year marked a welcomed departure from the wet weather of past Challenges and only good, warm sunshine rained down on the course riders. The OC covers parts of the Womble and Ouachita trail systems with about 23 miles of gravel and pavement sprinkled throughout. Riders come from all parts of the Midwest including Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Illinois and Oklahoma.