Mountain bikers pay for Chequamegon trail building
Every so often, I hear a rider complain that there’s no singletrack in the Chequamegon 40 or the Short and Fat races. The gist of these complaints usually boils down to the notion that “real” mountain bike races have “tons of singletrack,” and that the offended rider would have done much better if there were some or more singletrack.
The irony is that the singletrackless Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival has bankrolled a substantial amount of the singletrack that now exists in the area, nearly 90 miles worth, according to the Chequamegon Area Mountain Bike Association (CAMBA), which began building singletrack in 1999.
According to Gary Crandall, the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival director, last year’s race donated nearly $40,000 to CAMBA for trail building and trail maintenance. “Since Day One, our mission has been to be an advocate for the trails,” he said.
The donations come from two sources: the Save the Trails Fund and the $5 application fee everyone pays to enter the race lottery.
Last year, the application fee for the lottery brought in nearly $18,000 while the Save the Trails Fund netted almost $12,000. In 2008, the Trek Bicycle Corporation started matching Save the Trail donations up to $10,000. Since then, the fund has generated over $140,000, money which went directly to CAMBA.
Other events raise money for the singletrack they use
In the past few years, two other local races – the Chequamegon 100 and the Mt. Borah Epic – have emerged and followed the CFTF’s lead to give back to the local trails. Both of these races, unlike the CFTF, make extensive use of CAMBA’s singletrack. In fact, you can get good and drunk on singletrack at these events.
The Mt. Borah Epic begins in downtown Cable, runs out of town and down a gravel road for a few miles to separate the field, and then plunges into the woods. With something like 35 miles of singletrack, the Epic meanders from Cable to the fish hatchery just north of Hayward. It’s the alter-ego of the Chequamegon 40.
According to race director Jack Zabrowksi, the Epic’s donation to CAMBA after the 2014 race was $13,750, doubling the amount donated from the inaugural 2013 race. The field nearly doubled as well, jumping from 300 last year to 500 riders this year.
The Chequamegon 100, a 100-mile and 100K self-supported event, traverses just about every inch of CAMBA singletrack with the exception of the isolated CAMBA trails northwest of Ashland at Mt. Ashwabay. The Chequamegon 100 takes place around the summer solstice because it takes most mortals the longest day of the year to complete all 100 miles. The shorter and more doable 100K I like to call the kids’ race. In 2013, the event raised over $8,000 for CAMBA. Organizers expect to hand CAMBA a check of similar value this year.
Volunteer or machine built, trail construction doesn’t come cheap
All told, this is a significant amount of cash. But CAMBA expects to spend $60,000 this year on trail projects. CAMBA estimates that they will spend another $250,000 in the next four years building and maintaining trail in accordance to their five-year plan.
As with many trail systems, volunteers started and continue to drive CAMBA, but volunteers can only build and maintain so much trail. The cost of professionally built and machine built trails varies widely given the terrain and ecosystems, but costs exceeding $10,000 per mile are not an exaggeration. CAMBA estimates their trail building costs to be around $7,500 per mile.
Volunteers can and do build trail significantly more cheaply. That’s all we had in the beginning and what we rode for years. Some of my favorite places to ride in Wisconsin – Nine Mile, Levis Mound and the Underdown – were hacked out of the woods by tireless crews of volunteers. All of the dirt, stones and roots were moved, often painfully, by hand. Many trail systems came about without the funds, equipment or technical know how, yet some riders say they prefer these hand-hewn, old-school trails.
For sheer volume of trail construction, however, nothing beats machine-built singletrack. And for volume, there’s really nothing like machine-built CAMBA singletrack. One can ride continuous singletrack from Hayward to Cable, a 35-mile trip that takes four to five hours for the average mountain biker. It takes a professional rider at race pace well over two hours to complete the ride. (Jamis pro rider Rotem Ishay won this year’s Mt. Borah Epic in a record time of two hours, seventeen minutes and change.) If it’s possible to get high on singletrack, CAMBA is the place to do so.
CAMBA trail building on deck
This season CAMBA is working on connecting, via the Danky Dank Trail, the Hayward-Seeley-Cable section along the Birkie Trail with the Rock Lake and Namakagon sections east of Cable. When this is completed, an over 50-mile point-to-point singletrack expedition will be possible.
In addition to the Danky Dank connector, CAMBA is also working on several other projects. Besides a three-person maintenance crew, two field crews will tackle a reroute at Martel’s Pothole, a Camp 38 Trailhead connector, several reroutes on the old Ojibwe Trail, and more construction at Mt. Ashwabay outside of Washburn.
Back in 1983 when the first Chequamegon 40 rolled out of Hayward, “singletrack” was not part of the mountain bike lexicon. Ironically, the race which features zero singletrack was and is, in part, responsible for the largest glut of singletrack construction in the Midwest. If you haven’t already, go north and ride it.
Mark Parman lives in Wausau, Wisconsin, where he teaches English and journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County. He’ll likely be on hand at the Chequamegon Fat Tire Festival, held September 12-14.