Tourism Kamloops gives back to mountain bike trail builders

A concoction of topography, dirt and daring riders paved the way to make Kamloops into a world-renowned mountain biking destination, and now Tourism Kamloops is giving back to keep it that way.

The local agency set up a fund to help trail builders keep up with the hundreds of Kamloops mountain bike trails ridden by locals and tourists alike.

The Freeride Ain’t Free fund was announced last year, started with $50,000 of Tourism Kamloops seed money. The goal is to reap enough donations to support trail maintenance crews amid the growing sport.

“Here we were as an organization promoting… mountain biking, giving ourselves a pat on the back,” Tourism Kamloops CEO Eric Fisher told iNFOnews.ca.

“What we learned through this process is that we were contributing to a gap that was not sustainable… we were creating a divide between what the volunteers and paid trail hands could maintain.”

Among mountain bikers across North America, Kamloops is known as the birthplace of “freeride,” a style focused on technical, creative downhill riding. The Thompson Valley silt bluffs provided the perfect terrain for up-and-coming pros to push their limits, before the Bike Ranch was ever built.

“It’s no accident that Tourism Kamloops has come to this place. It’s thanks to pioneers of the sport who discovered the soil conditions and the variety of lines you can take. Kamloops, along with North Vancouver and Nelson, has the most elevation change within city limits across Canada,” he said.

The Kamloops Bike Ranch was built around 20 years ago and became the largest municipally-owned bike park on the continent, but it’s just one of several sanctioned trail networks in the area managed by the Kamloops Mountain Bike Trail Association.

The association’s president Cheryl Beattie said the fund, if successful, would “solve all our problems.”

Government grants typically fund new trails and capital projects, rather than maintenance, so the organization runs mainly on donations and event revenue. While organized by volunteers, they manage and maintain four trail networks with five paid staff.

“It’s very skilled labour, so we can’t rely in our world on volunteerism for trail work… So, it wasn’t a very helpful system going on by marketing the product and nothing going back into it,” she said.

Fisher said Tourism Kamloops has long sought to attract mountain bikers to the region. A survey last year found the sport contributes nearly $14 million in annual spending to the Kamloops economy, with half coming from tourists, but none of that contributes to the trail maintenance work.

He added that before the study, the local business community did not expect much local spending from mountain bikers. Instead, the survey found the average rider is around 40 years old and tourists typically spent two nights in Kamloops, staying at local hotels and shopping between riding.

The Tourism Kamloops seed money will soon be handed out to the trail association, but Fisher said donations have fallen short of where they’d like to be.

He added that they’ll be accepting donations to the trail fund at the Riverside Park bike valet, while Tourism Kamloops website offers Freeride Ain’t Free merchandise, where proceeds go back to the trail fund. More information can be found on the website here.