Results of Nov.5th steering committee meeting

Nice work on getting this going. I'm glad some folks stepped up - judging by the interest here we're bound for success.

Just a note on insurance. The Ministry of Tourism Culture and the Arts (MTCA) requires clubs to carry insurance to build/maintain trails on crown land (not including Provincial Parks) - which I think the Mice is. There is only one company that I'm aware of that insures clubs for the building and maintaining of stunts. They're called Oasis and the coverage is only available through IMBA affiliated clubs. If the club plans to operate in the Mice area - and take over maintainance of stunts - I think this is the only option.

This kind of sucks because I don't think this insurance would cover the road side of the club, so two policies would likely have to be bought.

Anyways, just thought I'd give you some insight from my expereicnce; hopefully it'll save you a step or two when looking into insurance.

Kev.

Kev,

Thank you for your input. With regards to stunts - and this is only me speaking, not the club or its current Steering Committee - I [personally] feel that there is no way that a bike club can or should take on the responsibility for maintaining any man-made stunts in the forest. There are a million and one variables that could affect the structural integrity, safety of fall-zones and who knows what other factors related to the integrity of the wide array of built-up items in the hills around Penticton.

In my rarely humble opinion… I feel that we should seriously look at shepherding city council – and the RDOS when applicable – towards allocating a section of land, and allowing us to build a proper, ‘by-the-book’ (to IMBA/Whistler Mt./Jay Hoots style Bike Park standards), Bike Park somewhere in the valley. Furthermore, I feel that it would be great to have said bike-park situated somewhat near a main trailhead. I suspect that there are a whole range of locations that I don’t know about, but I suggest that the 'Parking Lot’ on the north side of Campbell Mt. might be somewhere on the ‘Top 10 List’.

This isn’t something that will happen overnight, perhaps not even until the bike club has been around a few years; but I feel we have to gravitate in that direction in order to get a handle on liability, structural integrity, safety, maintenance, timely and repeated project assessment etc.

Finally; and again – this is just me yapping here – I feel that, generally speaking, folks shouldn’t actually be building stunts using factory dimension lumber in the forest. Bridges over water, hardening of trails through soft lands and the like are logical expressions of handiwork in the woods, and are very much appreciated, but dimension-lumber ‘kickers’ built by folks who don’t have the manpower to repeatedly maintain them in a timely manner… that’s another thing all together. I feel that these kinds of structures belong in a proper setting; one described in the paragraphs above. Other cities in the country have built some amazingly challenging stuff ‘in-bounds’, including drops bigger than anything I’ve seen in the woods around Penticton – (with the exception of “The Separator” in Naramata, which 99% of the population will never ‘hit’ anyway).

Another way of looking at it is this; we are just one of many trail-use groups in the forest these days. We have to keep reminding ourselves that dirt-bikers don’t build huge wooden structures, nor do hikers, birders, equestrians, cross-country runners or any other user group. Why should they have to look at our eye-sores? “Back in the day”, when I was a young man in Whistler, before the days of ‘Whistler Bike Park’ and the whole “Build Big Shi$ in the forest" movement, folks constructed trails using natural surface features – and the singletrack was amazingly technical, challenging and a blast to ride. A lot of Whistler’s trails, including Comfortably Numb, (a world-class, IMBA “Epic Trail”), are ‘sans-stunts’. Sure, there are bridges over sensitive areas (creeks / ground-water areas), but the trail as a whole is a natural-surface masterpiece! I’d like to encourage local builders to embrace that mentality; it’d go a long way towards polishing our sport’s image as far as other trail-use groups go…

Which leads me to my final rant :-) - Trails as a whole; as much as we are in fact working towards establishing a cycling association, I really feel that we are just as much a “Trail Association”. For those members who ‘dig the dirt’, we live, and love to learn on the trails and I feel that we need to embrace the notion that we can get a lot out of participation with other trail user-groups. What form a cooperative agreement / association with the local equestrian society / hiking groups / dirt-bikers / quad-riders might look like is any one’s guess and is open to discussion, but if last year’s Ellis Creek Canyon clean-up by the quad-riders is anything to go on, it could accomplish a lot of good things for all of us.

Andrew D.