Chasing Ghosts

The history of the North Shore is dominated by the myth of some dozen or so trails dating back to the earliest days of mountain biking. These were the heights of building and riding on the Shore, full of massive stunts and skinnies raised to dizzying heights. This frenetic period of building and progression spanned the late nineties and early aughts, laying the foundation for what we know as the Shore today.¹

Some of those original trails made it through the gauntlet of years, but some didn’t. You can still ride classics like Ladies Only or Boogieman, or you can try to make it across the Discombobulator. They’ve all changed a bit, but that’s just the way of things, I suppose. What haunts me is the thought of those trails we’ve lost altogether. Some were torn down by bureaucratic zealots, some by the slow pull of gravity. Some were simply forgotten, left behind in favour of loamier pastures.

These are trails I’ll never get to ride, and that saddens me. To be honest, I’m a little bit relieved as well, after hearing stories of how the old stunts churned through bike parts and bodies. Perhaps I’m better off in the slightly tamer new age of riding the Shore. Still, I have a keen desire to know what I’m missing out on, so I turn my attention to Mt. Fromme, to find the remnants of those half-forgotten trails. I want to see the myth with my own eyes and fully understand the fringe lunacy where this sport was shaped. It might, in the end, be a quixotic madness, and I’ll spend a handful of weekends tilting at windmills through hemlock and cedar, but who knows? Nothing about this sport makes much sense anyways.

Some ghosts are easier to pin down than others, and Jerry Rig was one. I find it on Trailforks, where a faded red line marks it as decommissioned. There’s nothing on the roadside to indicate where it used to start, but a path of exposed dirt dives into the woods. It could be a tricky bit of erosion or a lightly used game trail. While I scope it out, two men pedal to a stop near me on the road. We get to chatting.

I explain to them that I’m trying to see what’s left of Jerry Rig, mostly for the pure curiosity of it. They’re both delighted by my little “museum trip,” as one of them puts it, and they assure me there’s a light trail weaving in and around where the old one was built. That’s what they’re riding today, not for archaeological reasons but purely for the fun of it. Though it’s reassuring to know I’m on the right track, I still don’t know what I’ll find down there, if anything.

Just a short ways down the trail, the appearance of an enormous wooden wall eclipses any doubts I still harbour. It emerges from the forest floor, twice my height and twice that long. I can see it was once a wall ride, but I cannot fathom how to feasibly jump on and off it without taking a long dive to the forest floor. Just before the wall, the skeleton of an old take-off is sinking into the dirt. There is no landing in sight. From the top of it all, a yellow paper-mâché head glowers down at me.

Riding around what remains of Jerry Rig is like wandering through a museum, if everything was left vulnerable to the ravages of time and weather. Massive jumps rise from the dirt, their wooden supports rotting into oblivion. The landings I can see are always too far away and too flat. There are skinnies climbing up and up, linking a series of increasingly impossible manoeuvers. I pick my way through the ruins, astounded at the sheer size of it all.

It has been years since I read Moby Dick, but the chapter that sticks with me most is a dry and boring slog through the sun-stripped skeleton of a long-dead whale. Ishmael wanders the cavernous ribcage, speaking in excruciating detail of the beast’s anatomy. The chapter may seem superfluous – it did to me for a long time – but the whole experience is a reminder that myths are made of fragile things. The beast weighing so heavily on Ishmael’s life will someday become little more than a pile of bones. Nonetheless, it is a massive pile of bones, and the chapter further reminds us that this magnificent creature, even in death, is spectacularly sized.

At some point, the trail weaves underneath a skinny plank of wood, part of a long sequence of skinnies and ladder bridges. Curious to see how it would look from on top of the feature, I ditch my bike and try to swing myself up. The wood complains with a rotten cracking sound; it feels like Styrofoam, and I know there’s only a sliver of chance it might hold my weight. Even when I finally get on top of a solid-looking stump, the wood threatens to collapse at any moment.

The thought of actually riding Jerry Rig in its prime is a frightening one. It’s not that the structures are poorly built. Not at all. In fact, I mostly notice how solid and well-supported the structures would be, if only the wood weren’t so rotten. More impressively, I’m aware that this was built without our current accumulation of trail knowledge, without anything to take a blueprint from. It was a special sort of madness, dreamt up from almost nothing at all, and decades later, here I am watching its ghost fade into the grey woods.

No, I am scared of riding Jerry Rig because the jumps are too big and the landings are too flat; the skinnies are ten feet off the ground and make impossibly sharp turns. I’m no slouch on a bike, but I have a loud instinct for self preservation, and my caveman brain says no no no as I contemplate what it would take to throw myself down this gauntlet.

Jerry Rig was, despite its apparent difficulty, a beloved trail. Many people came to test their mettle on its jumps and contraptions. It is easy to think of these trails as some ancient history, ruins lost in the folds of years, but it is not so melodramatic. It’s not difficult to find someone around here who spent time riding those early trails. It’s not difficult to find the people who built them. Cam gets me in touch with Jerry Willows, architect of Jerry Rig. The Jerry. I have questions for him, most of all about the paper mâché head,² so I call him up.

Jerry is friendly and kind. As he talks about the building of those early trails, I can hear the depth of his experience; his fond memories of spending all day on one trail, trying to link all the different moves. He explains how sometimes eight of them would drop into a trail, but only two would actually ride the thing. How they never expected to clean the trails, just tried their best and fell off at some point, only to go back and try again. I don’t get the sense from Jerry that they knew they were building history. It was just something they did, working night shifts to spend all day in the forest, digging and crafting newer, more creative stunts.

I ask Jerry why he built what he built. What was the blueprint for their fantastic contraptions? He explains how he had this vision of a wallride in the forest. He’d seen it elsewhere in the sport, but never properly on a trail in the woods. When they found a suitable spot at the top of Jerry Rig, they made it work. That was it. The whole process. They constantly imagined new ways of going higher, bigger, further. It was all about how gnarly, how difficult they could built it. Nobody was really concerned with the longevity of their efforts. They wanted to build it, ride it, film it, and then dream up something new.

I’m coming to think of Jerry Rig as something moved on from, rather than something lost. Jerry talks about how tastes have changed and styles have adapted. He avoids skinnies like the plague now, much prefers going fast. He suggests that the riding today caters more to enjoyment and less to challenge. People are more focused on having fun than pushing the boundaries of the sport, and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

This observation was never more salient than on the day of my visit to the museum. It was May Long Monday, the sacred and unofficial start of summer season in Canada. The parking lot was full of bike-racked cars, small groups of people sharing post-ride beers. On the pedal up, I passed parents towing their kids, a teenager wearing a ski helmet, a group in matching jerseys who tasked me with catching their breakaway member, who complained the rest of them were too slow.

I wonder if any of them know about the ghosts hidden among the trees. I wonder if it matters, this unearthing, this desire to keep the past alive. Whether it might be better to let the trails sink into their graves.

Near the end of our conversation, I ask Jerry the inevitable question about how he thinks the Shore has changed. “It’s always evolving,” he says, “But the Shore’s the Shore.” It’s the same experience at the end of the day, whether you’re trying to make it across the Discombobulator or white knuckling your way down Bobsled. Everyone I saw on that Monday came here to ride, simple as that. Most of them aren’t interested in pushing the boundaries of the sport, and that’s okay. At the end of the day, it’s about getting on a bike and having as much fun as possible. It’s the reason people have been riding the Shore for decades, and it’s the reason we’ll keep riding the Shore until the forest grows over everything or the sea swallows it up, whichever comes first.

Footnotes

1. For a thorough history of riding on the North Shore, I used Seb Kemp’s History of the North Shore. It is an excellent account.
2. I did ask Jerry about the paper head, and he claims to know nothing about it. I guess it’s just another ghost hiding among the cedars, waiting for someone to stumble back in time.