Freeriding a challenge for bike riders, land managers

RENO, Nev. — Jon Wilson, a 27-year-old downhill mountain bike racer, likes the new style called freeriding because any challenge is fair game — from bombing down flights of stairs to dropping off 10-foot cliffs to riding across teeter-totters.

“Instead of a challenge between you and the clock, it’s a challenge between you and the obstacle,” the Reno resident said. “You don’t have competitors, you have buddies.”

Freeriding is catching on. This spring, the International Mountain Bicycling Association, the most prominent mountain biking group in the United States, devoted its entire newsletter to the subject.

Last month, the Northstar-at-Tahoe ski resort unveiled freeride trails and features for the first time at its mountain bike park. “Homemade” freeriding trails and features also are popping up on public lands.

But the sport’s popularity comes with controversy. Public land managers across the United States worry that rickety structures pose a risk and illegally built trails damage the environment and other resources.

“The folks out there are loving the forest to death sometimes,” said Steve Hale, a recreation specialist with the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest’s Carson ranger district, which surrounds Reno and Carson City.

While freeriding has invigorated the sport of mountain biking, it might be sowing a new crop of problems on public lands.

Wilson’s first experience with freeriding came this spring with a teeter-totter. It took him a few tries, but he finally rode all the way across the homemade playground-attraction-cum-mountain-bike-obstacle.

“It felt so good when it tipped over while I was riding across it,” he said.

Wilson had sworn off mountain biking for two years after a bad accident, but he returned to the sport when heard about new technical terrain and trail features from his friends and saw new mountain biking stunts on videos.

The explosion of freeriding trails and features has area public land managers worried. Officials are closing some trails and removing freeride structures when they find them.

“Sometimes these folks don’t realize the impacts they are having,” Hale said. “They’re just focused on the activity.”

Hale called freeriding an emerging issue for the Forest Service, nationally and locally. Building trails and features on national forest land is illegal without the Forest Service permission and study to determine the impacts.

Groups in other areas are working with land managers to pursue their sport.

In Auburn, Calif., longtime bicycling advocate Jim Haagen-Smit said freeriders have been meeting with managers of the Auburn State Recreation Area to agree upon rules and processes for building freeride terrain.

“At first, they (the land managers) freaked out, but we’ve reached a truce,” he said. “It takes a lot of work to make it work.”

In British Columbia, considered the movement’s birthplace, freeriding trails are a tourist attraction.

Towns like Breckinridge, Colo., have allowed groups to construct freeride areas in some parks. The International Mountain Bicycling Association has published extensive literature to teach freeriders how to work with public agencies and how to construct safe, environmentally friendly and long-lasting freeride trails and features.