IS B.C. GETTING SOFT?
On a typical afternoon, I meet my homies at Fleen’s man cave before going for a rip on our local trails. It’s a form of therapy. I say “our trails,” not because we own them. In fact nobody owns them; they are as illegit as a politician’s campaign promise. This network is unofficially called ‘The Vortex.’ For the uninitiated, entering this nondescript rolling landscape of scrappy second-generation forest can feel as disorienting as stepping off an airplane into an unfamiliar country with a strange culture and language. The trails of The Vortex speak the language of my native mountain-biking tongue. Built by a small cadre of self-organizing trailbuilders without consent, this spiderweb of wiggly singletrack is the type of riding on which British Columbia built its mountain-biking pedigree.
“People have no idea what 30 years of free trailbuilding did to develop mountain biking in B.C.,” Adrian Bostock, operations manager for the Salmon Arm-based Shuswap Trails Alliance,
