Picture this (and why shouldn’t you? I’m gonna paint it for you).
It’s a typical mountain biking magazine photo. It’s color. The focus is on the tread of a rear tire and its contact patch with the soil it is rolling over. The photo is shot with a large aperture cutting the depth of field down, causing the majority of the photo to be just outside of focus. But the focal point of the photo is crisp. So crisp that it feels, if a picture can have an emotion, as if you can see the crevices and cracks of the speck of dirt flying toward the camera lens. It’s a simple photo of a tire’s contact with soil being used to propel a bicycle forward.
These photos have always drawn me in. I find myself pulling the magazine page closer to my face to inspect the dirt, to see what tires are being used, to try and feel the connection.
These photos are what mountain biking is about, putting a tire on the dirt and cranking some pedals to see how things end up.
Of course, dirt isn’t just dirt and trails aren’t just trails. Some dirt feels like you can lean into it with such force and it will never give out, while other soil will drop you on your head without even giving you a chance to think about it. And while there are few trails that I truly don’t enjoy, there are those that are notch above the rest, that hold onto my focus and keep me pedaling.
As of late, I’ve felt like the majority of the trails that I have been riding have been destroyed. They are either littered with loose rocks from the last nasty rain storm we had or have been grapevined by riders who don’t know how to play within the boundaries of the trail. It doesn’t seem like I have seen beautiful singletrack in quite some time.
Until today.
The Church of the Holy Alliance of Mooseknucklers was held out on the Hurricane Rim. It felt good to pedal on some track that was single. It made me happy to see a trail that didn’t have a million different possible ways to go, without any thought of why we need so many ways to go to the same place. It felt holy to be on singletrack.
Even for nothing else, keep it single for the aesthetic quality.
But most importantly keep it single so we always have a place to ride that doesn’t feel like a dirt road. Places that evoke emotions in photographs that in turn make us feel like our passion has a place in the world.
Let’s keep singletrack single.