Breadcrumbs

When I was growing up, one of our neighbours had a basketball hoop that craned over the sidewalk. The fabric net dangled feet above my head, inches above my brother’s. Every day when we passed under it on our way to the school bus, I watched my brother reach with one finger to yank the same loop of net. It was an idle, mindless thing he did, and I started to do the same when I grew tall enough. Day after day, we stretched that little loop until it hung well below the rest of the net.

I don’t go home often enough these days. When I do, I am delighted to see all the small landmarks from our daily march to the bus. There’s a small ravine where I used to hide and build pretend campfires. There’s a mailbox where I saw my brother wait for the junior high bus, wearing sneakers in feet of snow. Then there’s the basketball net and the drooping loop of net, like a small finger reaching down to meet the memory of our own.

It’s like this with trails, too. Every time we ride a trail, we leave some mark of our passage. It could be as small as a spittle-drop of chain lube, or a faint smear of rubber on a rock roll; a gash of paint and aluminum left on a rock, a bit of knuckle-skin buried in tree bark. The conversation about where and how to build trails is preoccupied with the largest impacts of trails: erosion, drainage, felled trees and a torn-up understory. These are good and important concerns, but I want to spend some time on the small remainders, because those have become central to my riding on the Shore.

Today I want to talk about what we leave behind. This can be a touchy subject for us two-wheeled folks, and I understand why. So much of mountain biking is fueled by a punk-rock, DIY attitude. Ride whatever, wherever, however you want. This finds a counterweight in the desire to preserve our natural landscapes and keep the grubby hands of industry away from such fragile, threatened ecosystems. Often, the best approach is somewhere between the two. There are places we shouldn’t build trails, for a slew of justified reasons. Then there are places we probably shouldn’t build trails, but the impact is negligible so long as the traffic is limited. Then there are places where trails have little to no effect on the landscape, especially in the shadows of avaricious industry.

The Trailforks description for Grannies tells me that the trail is not easy to find and sees little traffic. Most of these old Fromme trails share similar descriptions. They are always “raw,” “natural,” and “old school.” Pretty soon you feel like whoever writes these descriptions are pulling three of the same five words out of a hat. “Let’s make this one rugged and rooty,” they say to each other. “Yeah, and that one should be steep and natural.”

Whatever the words, the trail will certainly be a perplexing mix of roots, rocks, and deep, loamy holes. When the trails are particularly “natural,” as they say, it is hard to distinguish the intended line from any number of rogue braids. It’s helpful to ride with someone who knows the trail, because line selection can be tedious on your own. After clunking my way down a lumpy, hellish section of trail, I’ve often looked up to notice subtle wear marks indicating an alternate, much cleaner line.

I thought Grannies was reasonably easy to follow, until it wasn’t. I’ll sheepishly admit that I lost the trail halfway down, but I chalk that up to how much fun I was having. For the most part the trail was clearly bedded-in, with some less obvious braided offshoots. What stumped me more, as with all these old classics, was how to actually ride the damn thing. In one section there were three or four clearly worn angles of approach, none of which indicated much beyond their entrance. I picked one that seemed easiest, and I stared at it for a long while until I noticed tire tracks on a flat stone in the middle, followed a few skid marks in the loam lower down. Aha. It all made sense.

I most enjoy this wayfinding game on trails that see less traffic than busy ones. Yes, there is something compelling about the imprints of heavy use. A deep rut in a beloved corner is a familiar testament to the regular flow of riders; something to be expected and complained about in the parking lot over beers. This is fine and good, but I want to find the old, faded marks left by riders long gone. I want to see evidence that someone was here long before I was, someone who jammed their bar end into this tree or mutilated their chainring on that fin of rock.

I have trouble explaining why I find comfort in retracing these old steps. I read a lot of old stories, both for my vocation and my own pleasure, and I find a great joy in thinking about the other people who have also read them. They may have lived hundreds of years ago, but they read these same lines and imagined something much like what I imagine. They laughed at the jokes. They saw themselves and their friends reflected in the stories. There’s the comfort – feeling the same emotion as innumerable people before you. I cherish this sense of closeness.

I mean this to say that when I pick my way down the steeps on Ladies Only, it is probably as terrifying and rowdy for me as it was for the people who built it. They were riding bikes that my spoiled young brain can’t quite fathom, and that would seriously dial up the oh-shit-ometer, so maybe it was even more terrifying for them. But still, I can feel the things they felt, the fear at the top, the triumph of making it down. I can experience this way of getting down this hillside on a bike because a small group of radicals dreamt it up years ago. For that, I am deeply indebted to them.

Before them, nobody thought to zig for this rock-roll and zag for that catch-berm. Nobody knew how much fun it could be, until they took to the dirt and carved out this place we now call the Shore. Then, like signing a guestbook, everyone who came after left some small mark of their passing. You can find their signatures on every trail: a skim of rubber on rock, a chip taken out of wood. I imagine the echo of whoops and hollers ringing in the miracle of time. These trails are littered with the breadcrumbs of passerby, and I feel an inexplicable need to follow them.

Perhaps I see it as a way to pay my respects to the history of riding on the North Shore By the time I got here, all the grumpy old men were complaining that everything’s been sanitized, smoothed over by excavators and a plague of blue flow. It’s easy to feel like I’ve missed the bus somehow, like I’ve landed here twenty years too late. I’ll never ride the Flying Circus or test my bone structure on the Boogieman piledriver. I might be riding the shore, but I’m not riding the Shore.

That’s a sad and lazy way to look at things, though. Bikes are as good as they’ve ever been. The trails, sanctioned or not, are plentiful and well-maintained. We have maps conjurable on screens that stash into the pockets of well-ventilated riding gear. Most importantly, for the intrepid ones, the old trails still thread their way through the trees, same as they ever did. If you look, you can find some of the most unique, bizarre, and butt-puckering descents to be had on a bicycle. There’s nowhere quite like it.

Off of Grannies forks another trail called Upper Crippler. I haven’t ridden it yet, but I have great plans to do so in the near future. There’s a comment about it on Trailforks that sticks in the back of my mind, by user chris2. I read it when I first got here, and it has been core to my ethos of understanding the North Shore:

Holy hell. Sign me up. I like weird things. I like things that take time, that need to bed into the grooves of my mind before I really, truly love them. That’s what it is about the Shore that really captivates me. This place is the lovechild of weirdos and lunatics, and it’s not for everyone. It takes patience, skill, and a good heart to love a trail that tries so very not to love you back. But if you look for the breadcrumbs, they’ll show you the way through these woods.