Catalina Bikers Take Their Last Ride Over Mountain Roads

The banning of mountain bike riding this week on Santa Catalina Island’s rugged, 76-square-mile interior has upset avid cyclists who say they will miss riding the remote back roads of this pristine island.

“I was very disappointed,” said student Gideon Rubin of San Francisco, who paid for a permit to join a mountain biking program in March and took a final ride on the island last weekend before the ban went into effect.

Last week the Catalina Conservancy, which owns most of the island, halted the program after an insurance company that provided coverage for the bicyclists dropped the policy.

Rubin, 24, a New York native who bicycled to California in 1985, said raves from a fellow biker about Catalina’s spectacular views and untouched terrain persuaded him to join the program.

Only hours after receiving a letter that the permit program was ending at midnight April 30, Rubin said he hopped a bus in San Francisco for a trip to Los Angeles and a farewell tour of the Catalina interior.

“I went partly because I felt it might be the last opportunity,” Rubin said. “There were some roads I hadn’t ridden and I felt I had to go back there. There’s something very special about being on top of a mountain and seeing two coasts at the same time. In a weekend you feel like you’ve been away for a month.”

The ban is not in effect in the towns of Avalon and Two Harbors.

Conservancy officials say they have assured the 330 bikers who bought permits so they could traverse Catalina’s interior that they will try to reopen the inner island to bikers as soon as possible.

One possible solution is finding another insurance company to pick up coverage of the program, conservancy Vice President Rose Ellen Gardner said.

Low Volume

The insurance company that covered the program until last month--which Gardner declined to name--decided to drop coverage because “the volume of the premium wasn’t large enough for them to write the policy,” she said.

Bicyclist Chuck Cotton, 70, who has led group excursions into the Catalina interior over the last three years, said he is disheartened but hopeful that the ban will be short. Cotton, who lives on Balboa Island in Orange County and has organized bike races throughout Southern California, said he has discussed ways to resolve the insurance crisis with conservancy officials.

Some of those options include seeking insurance coverage from the county, which operates several public parks on Catalina, or trying to get coverage by joining larger bicycling organizations such as the U.S. Cycling Federation, based in Colorado Springs, Cotton said.

“I can see, because of liability problems, that (the conservancy) could have a tremendous lawsuit on their hands” if there is an accident, Cotton said.

Don Brown of Brown’s Bikes, the only shop in Avalon that sells and rents mountain bikes, said several bikers who stopped at his shop for equipment before going into the interior were upset because they had to cancel their rides.

‘I’m Kind of Sad’

Brown said the ban would hurt his business “but not an awful lot.” About 10 people a week rent mountain bikes at the shop, but most serious cyclists bring their own bikes over by boat, he said.

“I’m kind of sad about it because I think it was a great program,” Brown said.

Under the permit program, fees were $50 a year for individuals and $75 a year for families, with $25 of the fee going for insurance, Gardner said. Bikers had to use 18-gear mountain bikes and wear helmets while riding.

Gardner said there was never an accident under the biking program, which ran from May 1, 1988, to April 30, 1989. Before the program was started, bicycling in the interior was banned for nearly a year after conservancy officials concluded in July, 1987, that bikers posed too much of a danger on the steep grades and hairpin curves of the interior roads.

Local bikers are contenting themselves with riding on the mainland until the Catalina interior reopens to bikers.

“It’s magnificent, so beautiful and pristine over there,” Cotton said. “But bicycling has a cost. I’m all in favor of permits to ride on Catalina. It’s one of the only places around we can kind of have all to ourselves.”