Clearing a Path : Mountain Bikers Earn Their Fun With Trail Maintenance

Mountain biking on the San Juan Trail in the Cleveland National Forest can be a thrill ride. That’s why adrenaline junkies swarm the place on weekends, mounting their fat-tired bikes for bone-rattling spins down the mountain.

Some prefer to ride up the 11.9-mile trail first--to “earn” their downhill fun. Others set up car shuttles so they can make it a one-way, mostly downhill run that drops 2,582 feet in elevation from Blue Jay Campground.

Whichever way you ride it, the trail needs periodic maintenance, and last Saturday about 25 avid riders spent most of the morning off their bikes, making improvements on part of the path.

For about three hours on a two-mile stretch of the trail’s upper loop, they cleared overgrown brush.

“I’ve used this trail so much,” said Costa Mesa’s Mike Lalonde, while hacking at the dry brush with a folding saw, “that I feel it’s my duty to help out.”

That was a common sentiment among the volunteer trail workers. They wanted to give something back to the sport and trails they love. It’s often a lonely battle. Many times maintenance days draw only a handful of bikers.

“Some people have a misconception that the trail maintains itself,” said Chris Dodge of Costa Mesa. “A couple guys passing by today that we shamed into helping us said they thought rangers cleared the trail.”

The turnout was heavy Saturday--the most ever for a maintenance day co-sponsored by the Warrior’s Society of the Santa Ana Mountains and the Share Mountain Bike Club--meaning a sizable stretch of trail could be cleared in a relatively short period of time.

The group met at 8 a.m. at the campground, and before the volunteers headed down the trail, Bob Loeffler, a past president of Share, gave them a briefing on how best to clear brush. He told them to cut at joints of branches so as not to leave sharp edges and to stash the cuttings far off the trail.

“Try to make it as aesthetically pleasing as possible,” Loeffler said. “It’s green now but in a couple weeks it will be brown and if it’s visible, we’ll get a lot of grief from the Sierra Club.”

Then the volunteers got on their bikes, spreading themselves out on a long stretch of trail down to an informal rest stop known as “Cocktail Rock.”

The volunteers worked in groups of two to four, some cutting back the brush and others gathering it and disposing it on down slopes.

“It’s encouraging to see the old cuts,” said Keith Eckstein, working in a particularly thick patch of scrub oak, “because then you know we’ve been here before. We try to cut back far enough so we don’t have to come back as often.”

Eckstein has been a regular at Share Mountain Bike Club maintenance days since 1991. In the past couple of years, Share has been joined by a new organization, the Warrior’s Society of the Santa Ana Mountains.

The Warrior’s Society is made up of people who have finished the society’s 56-mile ultra-endurance mountain bike race and have dedicated themselves to protecting and maintaining trails in the Santa Ana Mountains.

Chris Vargas, executive director of the group, said it is difficult to get mountain bikers to put down their bikes and help on the trails. But, he said, bikers must get involved or they will lose access to mountain areas, which are already being squeezed by urban development.

The Sierra Club is investigating, Vargas said, whether to call for designating portions of the Cleveland National Forest as a protected wilderness area, “which would mean no vehicles, no dogs, no mountain bikers.” The San Juan Trail falls in the area in question.

“I’m a firm believer that if mountain bikers don’t have an activist attitude,” Vargas said, “they shouldn’t have a voice.”

Vargas, who lives in Cypress, said responsible mountain bikers must act to make up for the few “bad apples” who damage trails and the sport’s reputation.

“We are trying,” he said, “to put together a core group--a tribe--to protect the land for future generations.”

The next scheduled trail maintenance sponsored by the Warrior’s Society and Share is Dec. 11 on the Trabuco Creek Trail. Call (714) 894-8211 or check the Web site https://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/5823/warriors.html for information.

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Happier Trails

Orange County mountain biking clubs regularly work to improve local mountain trails this time of year. Last Saturday, more than 30 members of Share Mountain Bike Club and the Warrior’s Society of the Santa Ana Mountains cleared brush from several miles of the San Juan Trail in Cleveland National Forest.