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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.

There was a workday at Matson Hill this weekend. Apparently not a lot of people knew about it. There were some conflicts with a few big events, namely the Ouachita Challenge, and the Ozark Trail Mega Event, but clearly, having only 12 or so people show at a park which is slated to have perhaps the most singletrack in the metro area was less than we hoped for.

I recently attended the Professional Trailbuilders Conference in Asheville, NC on March 18th and 19th. After the conference, I participated in the a USFS Chainsaw Certification class in the Dupont State Forest. The conference was set up in 1:15 sessions on various subjects pertaining to land use, trail building and trail management.