MUD leaves tracks, and when people ride around mud puddles, it widens the trail, increases trail damage and ultimately ruins our beloved single track.
The NOCS slogan for spring, well, every bike club’s motto really. Why do we say stay off the trails when they are muddy? Because riding muddy trails or avoiding mud on the trail leads to trail crew nightmares to come!
But isn’t that the trail crews job? Well yes and no… if we want trail crew to maintain all of our trails we need to be good trail stewarts in the spring so that the trail maintenance is a manageable load to bear. Our volunteers and trail crew have a list of trails that need work and when early spring riding wrecks trails they then need to come in to fix these trails rather than working on other ones.
How to approach riding your bike in the early spring
While the snow is still on the ski slopes, it has melted in town, so you’ve started to have bike dreams instead of the other kind of wet dream (you know, the one where snow falls in abundance.)
We know you are all so eager to get on your bikes and ride so here’s how to do it without wrecking the trails
Be ready to re-route. If you go up a trail and find it’s muddy – turn around. Ride that one another day and maybe post in Trailforks that it is too wet to ride which gives other riders the option to choose better sun baked trails.
What is wet and what is muddy? Do you sink into it? It’s mud.
Get off and walk your bike. Don’t ride around a mud puddle, that’s what we call trail expansion, and it’s not in the plan we send to parks each year for added km’s to the trails. Also – we want to keep our single track single and riding around a mud puddle creates chariot width trails in no time!
Check out Trail Forks for reports of trails that are already dry
Be a trail Ambassador, if you find mud, report it to Trail Forks
Watch our social media. We will be posting trail updates each Wednesday throughout the spring on trail conditions.