PedalTrout

The Nova Scotia Mountain Bike Trails Association held it's first official International Trails Day event at Fitzpatrick Mountain today. A crew of 10. armed with leaf rakes, loppers, shovels and Pulaskis, headed onto the trail to fix trouble spots and prep the course for the upcoming Fitz of Fury Provincial Mountain Bike Championship Race.

What do you get when you cross 10 avid mountain bikers with a trail that needs some love? Well, for one thing, you get dirty. With the first swing of my Pulaski, I not only coated myself in goopy swamp mud, but I think I served a helping to most of the others who were helping me drain a horribly wet section of trail, as well. Nobody complained, even jokingly - everyone was far too intent on solving the problem of water that had nowhere to go.

Manual labour aimed at improving something you love doesn't seem difficult at all. While shoveling snow from a driveway is a task from hell, scooping muck from the earth with your bare hands and digging mildewy, mossy rocks from long-buried piles is almost zen-like. As we worked on draining and armouring that trail very little was said but everyone seemed content. There was no question or argument about how to proceed - we just latched onto some tools and made it happen.

After almost 3 hours of work, our group reunited with those who had gone to rake. Although rain had started to fall, the trail was mostly dry and it was time to ride.

The true test of repairs on the trail comes when rock meets rubber. Our major fix passed with flying colours and despite increasing amounts of wet stuff falling from the sky we made it to the top of the mountain and back down again in one piece, tired, but still smiling.

The day ended with beer (and food) at a Pictou pub. As we sat and ingested, discussing matters bicycle-related and not, it occured to me that of all the sports and interest groups I've known, mountain biking is unique. It's the only one where a group of strangers, united only by a common interest, can agree upon a task, complete it, socialize willingly afterwards, and do so without a single argument, dispute or mean-spirited competetive bribe.

To everyone who came out today, thanks! What a sincere and wonderful group of people you are. To everyone who missed out, I hope you'll have a chance to experience a day like this sometime soon.

Every time I volunteer for something a voice in the back of my head asks me "What the hell are you doing? You know you're going to regret this." Today's work session proved that voice wrong and I'm pretty certain that with fine folks like these throwing themselves into the mix, the Nova Scotia Mountain Bike Trails Association is going to be a force to be reckoned with.

So last week I took a short road trip over to Fitzpatrick Moutain in Scotsburn with a few buddies. It is about a 45 minute drive from Truro. We went on last sunday and it was extremely hot. I printed a nice gps map of the trails that I managed to acquire that has all the trail names. This was incredibly useful. I will post this here as well as the route we took if nobody objects to it. We started off parking at the elemantary school and headed up to the trails which start beside the ball field behind the school. I was impressed by the signage on this trail. It is very well marked. There are some pretty technical and rooty spots going in. A lot of time must have been spent building bridges over the low areas in here as theres lots of them. It was very dry when we were here, but I bet this would be a very challenging spot if it was a bit wet. We started in and turned on reindeer rd which has a few short hills up and down and then swung onto maddies madness and then ella awesome trail. This section was very fun and winds through the trees. After that we connected onto freerider and went up that hill. I must say this would be much funner to go down than up.Then you connect onto sweet severn and it takes you up near the chalets at the top where we thankfully stole some water from a hose on one of the buildings. I think I drank 2 litres of water this trip and lost about 4 litres of sweat, haha. Quite a view at the top, you can see pretty far. We decided to pass on the section of trail that takes you towards the windmills as we were all getting a little tired (and one of my friends did all that uphill on a near 50 pound downhill bike, lol) and went onto the fitzpatrick mountain trail. The first part is all down through a field and winds back and forth. It was rutted a bit but you could still get a lot of speed. Finally, it cuts into the woods and this is where this trail gets awesome. Pretty much a steady downhill that is pretty rough. I believe this is the downhill race course? Once again very rocky and lots of roots but you can get some major speed through some of the sections. Once again it is marked well with signs. It crosses the road once so watch out for cars. It kind of reminded me of some of the ski wentworth downhill trails only not quite as steep. I would definitely recommend hitting up this trail system. I know I will be back to check out the rest of the spots that we did not hit that day. Maybe just bike up the road and come down the trails next time as I think they would be funnest in this direction.



 If the rain holds off, this weekends trip is to wentworth trails behind the hostile.