This year, it was titled the IMBA Upper Midwest Regional Summit and it was hosted in Cable, WI, in the middle of the Chequamegon . . . → Read More: IMBA Upper Midwest Regional Summit in Cable, Wi: good meeting, great riding]]> Last June I attended my first regional IMBA Summit, held in Crosby, MN near the Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Trail System. It was titled the 2nd Annual Great Lakes Summit.

This year, it was titled the IMBA Upper Midwest Regional Summit and it was hosted in Cable, WI, in the middle of the Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association (CAMBA)’s off-road bike trail system.

   
After the IMBA Upper Midwest Regional Leadership Advisory Council meeting on Friday afternoon (I didn’t attend), a group of us got in a 10-mile ride on CAMBA’s Seeley Pass Trail from the HWY 00 Trail Head. I was indeed "superb rolling, flowy singletrack." We then made our way to the Sawmill Saloon in Seeley for refreshments and dinner and where I got a chance to chat with a couple of fellow geezers that I’d met briefly on the ride, CAMBA’s Executive Director Ron Bergin and longtime CAMBA trail coordinator/volunteer Steve Morales.

   
IMBA’s Midwest Regional Director Hansi Johnson opened the Summit on Saturday morning at the Cable Community Centre, thanking the 35+ attendees for coming and citing examples of regional cooperation in the past year (e.g., teaming up on get-out-the-vote efforts for the Bell-Built Grant competition).

    
Representatives of the Upper Midwest IMBA chapters at the Summit (there are over 20) then each gave short summaries of their chapter’s activities and accomplishments in the past year, as well as their plans for the upcoming year.  In a follow-up email, MORC Board Secretary Susannah King captured my sentiments:

It was helpful to see so many other clubs working toward a common goal, dealing with similar (and different) successes and challenges that we do.   

  
IMBA Director of Public Affairs Jeremy Fancher (with support from colleague Aaron M. Smith) presented on the legal ins and outs of IMBA Chapters having  MOU’s, partnership agreements, contracts, etc. with land managers/owners.  Several Chapter board members I talked to afterwards seemed grateful, worried, and motivated to roll up their sleeves upon returning home to delve deeper into their land manager agreements and do what needs to be done to make them better.

  
John Gaddo from QBP gave an overview of the rapidly growing fat bike market (expected to double in the next two years). In the Western US, there’s a push with land managers to allow fat bikes to share the use of cross country ski and snowmobile trails for touring-type riding in the winter. But here in the Midwest, he felt it’s far better for Chapters to focusing on grooming some of their singletrack for both fat bikes and regular mountain bikes; hence, a good chunk of his presentation was about the variety of snow grooming techniques and equipment being used in the area. Reed Smidt, president of MORC, gave details on their grooming experiences in the past few years.

  
The session on fundraising featured Adam Sundberg and Kit Grayson from COGGS and Lori Hauswirth and Aaron Rogers from the Copper Harbor Trails Club.

COGGS has learned 1) how to leverage small grants into a series of ever-larger grants; and 2) that face-to-face, ongoing contact with the grantee organization is critically important, ie, it’s not enough to just submit the application. They’ve also learned that 1) its annual Gala allows them to reach out to a segment of the Duluth population that doesn’t mountain bike but who believes in its importance to the area. Attendees include community leaders and the more financially well-off; 2) it’s best to have auction items have wide appeal rather than being mtb-related (eg, vacation packages, restaurant deals, etc); and 3) the committee in charge of the Gala works on it for the entire year.

Copper Harbor has learned 1) how to scale the value of its sponsorships from local business owners; and 2) how to conduct a raffle with large ticket items (2013 raffle: $6,000 camping trailer, $4,400 Trek, etc).

 
IMBA Mapping Specialist Leslie Kehmeier presented on their new partnership with MTB Project which this IMBA page describes as

a next-generation mountain bike guide and trail map web site. This robust platform for online mapping displays the known trails in any given area, complete with elevation profiles, full GPS routes, photos, detailed ride info and more.

They’re going to be adding a feature that I think will create an incentive for Chapters to participate/contribute: once a trail has been mapped, embed code for it can be put on a Chapter’s own website. The quality of the mapping is not something that a Chapter could easily do on its own, so when this happens, it will be a pretty big deal IMHO.

Leslie blogs about the project at IMBA.com. See all the IMBA blog posts in the Mapping Category, including her recent blog post, Understanding "rides and trails" on MTBproject.com:

If you’ve visited the MTB Project website you may have noticed two categories: "rides" and "trails." Some have wondered what the difference might be — one doesn’t exist without the other, right?

  
CAMBA Executive Director Ron Bergin led the group ride after the Summit was over. I took one photo as riders were getting ready to depart but the vicious mosquitoes created a strong incentive to keep it in my hydration pack thereafter.  His description of the new (built last summer) cross country flow trail:

5 miles of fast riding, open & flowing with dozens of bermed turns plus two super-fun gravity features and a 180-foot log ride. Start from our newest trailhead on Camp 38 Rd. – so new there are hardly any signs yet.

  
I found some photos of this new trail in the CAMBA Trails Flickr group including the two above by Scott Anderson of that 180-foot log skinny (which can be ridden backwards) and the roller coaster Gravity Cavity section (which can be ridden repeatedly in a loop). These two photos are small thumbnail-sized screenshots that are linked to Scott’s originals. Be sure to click through to see them. After Saturday’s ride, we gathered for refreshments and stone oven pizza at the Rivers Eatery in Cable.

  
On Sunday, some did the 27-mile Rock Lake IMBA Epic ride and others, including me, just the 12-mile Rock Lake trail (click here to see the difference between a ‘ride’ and a ‘trail’). Most notable for me was 1) the steep rocky downhill section called Wall Street; and 2) the No Hands Bridge (I used both hands and road the angled cut board). The above right photo is from this blog post about the entire Rock Lake trail by someone named rlove2bike.

All in all, ’twas a memorable weekend of great weather, good information, tasty food, excellent microbrews, and exhilarating riding, all stitched together with friends new and old.  Saaaaaweeeet.

    The Dirt Bosses of MORC (most but not all pictured in left photo above) and REI Twin Cities Educational Outreach Coordinator Mikaela Swanlund put over 60 volunteers to work on MORC’s mountain bike trails at Salem Hills Park/Harmon . . . → Read More: Photo album: REI and MORC team up for National Trails Day Service Project at Salem Hills]]> REI hosted their National Trails Day Service Project on Saturday, part of their REI Stewardship initiative.

   
The Dirt Bosses of MORC (most but not all pictured in left photo above) and REI Twin Cities Educational Outreach Coordinator Mikaela Swanlund put over 60 volunteers to work on MORC’s mountain bike trails at Salem Hills Park/Harmon Reserve in Inver Grove Heights.

See my large slideshow of 90 photos (recommended) or SLOW CLICK this small slideshow:

I ‘paused’ delivery late last fall to change some settings and neglected to turn it back on. Last week, a subscriber alerted me to the . . . → Read More: Blog delivery via email now back]]> If you’ve subscribed to the Mountain Bike Geezer blog via my email newsletter (I use the MailChimp service), you may be wondering why nothing’s been delivered the past few months.

I ‘paused’ delivery late last fall to change some settings and neglected to turn it back on. Last week, a subscriber alerted me to the problem. Duh.

If you want to catch up on blog posts you’ve missed, you can just go to the Mountain Bike Geezer home page and scroll to the bottom, clicking on ‘older entries’ when you get there.

Or you can pick a month from the blog archives drop-down menu on the right sidebar and you’ll be shown all the blog entries from that month, for example, January, 2013.

But it occurred to me during last week’s Ride the Keweenaw that I might be able to watch the sun rise over the . . . → Read More: Copper Harbor: one of the few places where you can watch the sun rise and the sun set over Lake Superior]]> It’s not difficult to find a good spot to watch the sun set over Lake Superior when visiting Copper Harbor, MI, the town at the northernmost tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

But it occurred to me during last week’s Ride the Keweenaw that I might be able to watch the sun rise over the lake, too. I got up early and drove east on US 41. It turned to a dirt road and I kept going till I saw a crude sign that said "Horseshoe harbor" and followed that road and eventually discovered a walking trail that led to the Mary Macdonald Preserve at Horseshoe Harbor, managed by the Nature Conservancy:

At the northernmost tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, stunted shrubs and trees cling to ancient bedrock directly in the path of Lake Superior’s fierce winds. The 1,261 acre Mary Macdonald Preserve at Horseshoe Harbor is the largest and highest quality mainland preserve for bedrock beach and bedrock glade communities in Michigan. The rock ridges that define the shoreline are wave-eroded edges of sedimentary conglomerate rock uplifted some 600 million years ago. They now create a barrier between the pounding wind and waves of Lake Superior and the woodlands behind them, protecting and allowing the emergence of slower growth plant species.

I took a few photos:

but I didn’t get a decent one of the huge ‘conglomerate rock’ along the shore.  I found this photo online from a geocache page:

Left photo: Friday night dinner at the Harbor Haus with Aaron Rogers, Karl Erbach, and Hansi Johnson.

Center: Monday morning breakfast at the Pines Restaurant with (L to R) with Lori Hauswirth, . . . → Read More: Scheming about IMBA’s Upper Midwest region]]>   
During last week’s Ride the Keweenaw, Copper Harbor’s restaurants provided opportunities to do some scheming about IMBA’s Upper Midwest region (Facebook page).

Left photo: Friday night dinner at the Harbor Haus with Aaron Rogers, Karl Erbach, and Hansi Johnson.

Center: Monday morning breakfast at the Pines Restaurant with (L to R) with Lori Hauswirth, Hansi Johnson, Aaron Rogers, Mike Brunet, and Lyle VanderSchaaf.

Right: The conversation at times turned to mountain bike tourism for the Upper Midwest region, as epitomized by Jay and Claire, two college students visiting Copper Harbor from Vermont. They were traveling to Montana, trying to visit as many mountain bike parks as possible on their way. For their next stops after Copper, I told them that the sequence (heading west) would be to ride CAMBA, Spirit Mountain, COGGS, and then Cuyuna. Alas, due to the wet and cold spring, only Cuyuna would work for this trip.

    Plus, I knew that there were plenty of photos and videos of this IMBA Silver-level Ride Center online . . . → Read More: Copper Harbor Trail System: the bar has been set high for Upper Midwest mountain biking]]> With only a short amount of time to ride the trail system at Copper Harbor during this year’s Ride the Keweenaw, I didn’t want to spend much time taking trail photos or shooting any video. 

   
Plus, I knew that there were plenty of photos and videos of this IMBA Silver-level Ride Center online already. A good place to start for photos: the Keweenaw Adventure Company‘s Epic Rides page which has several photos by IMBA’s Midwest Regional Director Hansi Johnson.  For videos, start with the stunning interactive Copper Harbor Trail system map by the Trail Genius.

As this April 8 2013 reviewer wrote on MTBR about the trail system:

There’s a little for everyone, with technical rocky areas, long flow rides, extended downhill tabletop jump sections, climbs that make you whoop if you manage to scramble up, boardwalks, simple trails next to dropoffs… just spectacular.

   
Among my goals: I wanted to try some of the smaller table top jumps and advanced berms. Much of the big stuff on the double black diamond trails was over my head but even on runs like the Flying Squirrel and On the Edge there was still plenty of fun stuff that I could ride. 

But it wasn’t till I rented a dual suspension Kona Process from the Keweenaw Adventure Company that I got a taste of what’s possible.

I was shocked how much easier it was for me to pump the rollers and go fast on the downhill gnarly stuff than with my hardtail 29′er.  Full squish has just moved ahead of a fat bike on my bike quiver priority list.

  
I didn’t see it but Hansi crashed twice on one of jumps on the Danimal trail, taking a hard whack to his head and miscellaneous other body parts. I wore my POC Cortex DH MIPS full-face helmet for the first time and if I ever get better at the jumps, I can see a neck brace in my future. (Hansi’s photo of me above is included in his blog post titled A Copper Harbor fish story: Ride the Keweenaw 2013. His narrative and photos are riveting.)

 
Copper Harbor Trails Club president Aaron Rogers has led the creation of this amazing trail system. That page says:

Aaron came in search of epic snowboarding at Mt. Bohemia and stayed to build epic bike trails in Copper Harbor. A man with a vision for greatness, Aaron built upon a foundation of great trails on great terrain and turned them world class. Now a contracted professional trail builder with IMBA Trail Solutions, Aaron’s heart remains in Copper Harbor.

Fortunately for us (and his wife Amanda), he prefers to build trails in Copper Harbor but also dabbles farther south on the Peninsula. If you find Aaron, it will be at the end of a newly built trail at the controls of the mini-excavator or with Pulaski in hand. If you can’t find him, it is most likely because you can’t catch him. He’s as good a rider as he is a trail builder.

Like most everyone else who’s ridden Copper, I can’t wait to go back.  And I’m thrilled that some of the MTB parks here in Minnesota are learning from what’s been done there.

   an excellent rock band, a GoPro-equipped quadcopter, and a, um, enthusiastic dancer provided entertainment.

   Lianna Miller, Lori Hauswirth and . . . → Read More: Ride the Keweenaw: When the mountain biking is done, the fun fundraising begins]]>   
When the mountain biking was over on the Sunday of the Ride the Keweenaw weekend, the festivities in Copper Harbor park ramped up.  Many dozens lined up for the $25/person BBQ fundraiser while…

  
an excellent rock band, a GoPro-equipped quadcopter, and a, um, enthusiastic dancer provided entertainment.

  
Lianna Miller, Lori Hauswirth and Bill Marlor from the Copper Harbor Trails Club began selling tickets for their big 2013 raffle (drawing is Sept 1).

  
Left: It’s always good to see some fellow graying geezers on the trails and at the party. These guys were from Ishpheming, MI
Center: Hollywood Dave Markman and CHTC Board Member Tony Schwenn provided security
Right: He doesn’t know it yet but MTU student and hot shot mountain biker Oliver Cooper is going to be my coach next time I’m back up there.

   
As the sun went down, the dancing cranked up. A fitting end to a memorable event.

Because there is no ski area with a chairlift in Copper Harbor, the KAC shuttle is the next best way to get you and your mountain . . . → Read More: Of the three ways to get to the top of the Copper Harbor trails, Sam’s is best. Duh.]]>    
Sam Raymond owns the Keweenaw Adventure Company in Copper Harbor. He offers a shuttle service to mountain bikers who come to ride the Copper Harbor Trails system. Why?

Because there is no ski area with a chairlift in Copper Harbor, the KAC shuttle is the next best way to get you and your mountain bike to the top of the mountain without having to pedal! An activity that is most commonly associated with ski resorts out west, mountain bikers enjoy bombing down Copper Harbor’s sustained vertical descents along the miles of sweet singletrack that connect the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge, Brockway Mountain and the village, nearly 600′ vertical and up to 3 miles below.

  
On the Sunday of the Ride the Keweenaw weekend, the shuttle was busy. They put up chains in front of the shop to provide some first-come, first-served structure to the riders waiting to get taken to the top. Once everyone piles inside the 14-passenger van, the driver (either Sam or one of his two trusty bike mechanics Jeff Squires or Jerry Smith) yells out “Where to?”

  
A consensus quickly emerges as the choice is simple: either the parking lot at Keweenaw Mountain Lodge or the top of Brockway Mountain, both about a mile from town.  If you miss the shuttle, it’s no biggie. It can make a round trip in 15-20 minutes.  And Sam’s getting another 14-passenger this summer to speed things up even further.

  
The shuttle currently runs noon-5:00pm on weekends and 5:30-9:30pm on Tuesdays. If you want to ride the trails at other times, team up with someone else for a DIY shuttle service with two vehicles like I did with IMBA’s Midwest Regional Director Hansi Johnson and his snazzy Subaru Outback.  Of course, you can also pedal to the top.  Hansi said that riding up the Stairway to Heaven trail (that’s a link to a recent YouTube video) is the easiest route to the top.  Nearly all trails at Copper are two-way, and riders going up have priority over riders going down, although I mainly experienced the opposite.

    About a third of the way down the trail, we . . . → Read More: Karl Erbach saves the day for Dave and son Colin with a cool trail-side tire repair]]> Around noon on Sunday of the Ride the Keweenaw weekend, Karl Erbach, Territory Manager at Trek Bicycle and I were riding a trail on Brockway Mountain called The Flow, one of the many spectacular trails that are part of the Copper Harbor Trails system.

   
About a third of the way down the trail, we came upon Dave and his 8 year-old son Colin from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Colin’s tire was shot: punctured tube and blown sidewall. Karl patched the tube and then deployed a trick I’d never seen before. He used a candy bar wrapper (he said a dollar bill would work, too) to reinforce the sidewall.

In 15 minutes or so, Karl had worked his magic (he also did a few other adjustments on Colin’s bike).

Dave and Colin were soon smiling on their way back to town, riding 3 miles instead of having to do a tough hike-a-bike.