The Smoke Room

Alright, before we even get started, let’s get something straight. The nickname… Before you jump to conclusions, maybe have a gander over at this. I worked at Cove Bikes for a long time, and you pretty much had to have a nickname as part of the job description. I lucked out. Imagine how “NumbNutz” feels having to explain his handle.

Back to our regularly scheduled topic....

Adventure.


Yes, this topic has been covered ad infinitum, but I don’t care. It’s my column. So for the inaugural episode, I’m going to cover what’s kept me interested all these years.

My first bike was a 20”, banana seat, Stingray knock-off by BRC. I think I got my first concussion the second day I had it, trying to bunny hop a speed bump. It was a heavy P.O.S. with rubber pedals and ape hangers, and completely useless in just about any situation. It wasn’t long before I was taking it to pieces and trying to make it more like a BMX. Luckily, there was this new shop in Deep Cove that sold windsurfers and beach cruisers that could help me out … when they were actually open that is. By the time I was 12, I’d gotten a real BMX, and my old curve frame had been adapted with some Magura moto bars and five gears.

Now, this was a major turning point, as now I could go on dirt, and I could ride further afield. Suddenly my world didn’t end at Gus’s Hardware. There were whole new realms to explore like Dollarton and Blueridge.

More importantly, shortly thereafter two very important things happened. The first was that there was a new kind of bike called a “Mountain Bike”, and something else called puberty came calling. I lucked out and got both. I couldn’t afford anything like a Ritchey, or a Rocky Mtn., but I did get another BRC - the ‘Focus”, which my sister still has. This bike had knobby tires, 18 gears, and riser bars. The year was 1984, and suddenly I had the means to quickly transport myself over to the next high school where the girls were unaware of all the dumb shit I’d done in my own backyard. Oh yes, life was good. I had urges, but even if I couldn’t satisfy them all, I could at least tire myself out to the point where I could function like a human being instead of a teenager.


Plus, we had all heard of the boys at the bike shop using these bikes to ride the trails on Seymour. One afternoon in grade 9, a few of us played hooky and rode up Seymour a couple of clicks to the Baden Powell, and that was it. I had a whole mountain in my backyard full of trails to explore. My world was rapidly expanding. I got a better bike (a Nishiki Kodiak, with a full Shimano Deore kit on it), and I rode that beast all over the lower Seymour trails. The bike shop was also doing well, and had expanded into a bigger store with better and better bikes. After a few years of riding around Seymour, I’d found a group of guys to hang with that were as stoked as I was to explore new trails. But we were still bound to the immediate area east of the Seymour river. It wasn’t until I was 15 that things expanded again.

That year was the world’s fair in Vancouver, 1986. I was hanging around the park in Deep Cove when Chris Hansen came skidding around the corner at mach 2.3 with a pissed off expression on his face.

“You want a job?” he asked.

“Uhhhh….sure.”

“Show up at Black’s Cameras in Pacific Center downtown tomorrow at 10, and you’ve got mine. I’m sick of riding this much.” And just like that he left and I stepped into a whole new world.

It wasn’t much of a gig. I rode downtown, picked up some film, rode it over to Park Royal, and an hour later would take it back to Pacific Center for another load. After another trip, I’d sometimes have a couple of deliveries to make, and then I’d ride back to Deep Cove-all for the astonishing payment of $25 a day. I couldn’t believe it. I was getting PAID to ride my bike. Not only that, but I was riding up to 50 miles a day. Apart from the late night leg cramps, it was the perfect life. The major impact was that I now realized that I could ride more places than just Seymour. The whole North Shore was open to me now.


It wasn’t long before I felt the first stirrings of a lifelong malady known as upgradeitis. I worked my ass off at various jobs like cleaning boat bottoms and yard work so I could afford my first Rocky Mountain. That was the Discovery, and I pringled the front wheel on that bike on my very first ride.


The bikes were turning over quickly now. I had a string of Konas that quickly got stolen. Then, with all my newfound wealth I plunked down my $800 and got a Brodie ClimbMax (they were hand built steel back then, and very chi-chi exotic). I also got a copy of 107 Hikes in South-Western BC and started to peel off the trails in there one by one. Sometime around here, I’d found out a couple of essential truths. One was that the Cove Bike Shop guys that I’d thought I’d been emulating were mainly riding old logging roads while I was out exploring singletrack. Another was that judging by the tracks I was seeing I wasn’t the only idiot dumb enough to try riding hiking trails on the North Shore. And a third was that the advent of getting a driving license not only allowed me to go further than ever to find new trails, but that I’d also lost a whole crew of riding partners who were suddenly not interested in pedals that didn’t make gasoline flow.

Lame.


Good thing I found out about Cypress. It was while exploring there with the few riding friends I still had that I ran into the Herberber crew. That would be guys like Dangerous Dan, Mtn. Bike Mike, and Digger. While I’d been out on Seymour, they’d been out on Fromme and Cypress. Now I knew who had been laying all those other tracks. My lust for new singletrack was suddenly fueled with what seemed to be an endless supply of dirty lines in the woods.


But it wasn’t to be so. As much as I love the Shore and the way it spits up new trails on a regular schedule, the sense of the unknown and the spirit of exploration that drew me to the sport was beginning to be replaced by a new atmosphere as more and more people started to take up the banner of mountain biking. Things like the advent of wooden structures helped, but that was in some ways the antithesis of the exploration and adventure vibe that I was after. Granted, my range was improving. I was doing rides of up to 80 miles since Moo and Click took me out for a beating on Furry Creek, but I was not finding the volume of new stuff that I’d been accustomed to. On my BMX, a five mile rip would be almost 100% new to me. On the Team Marin I was now rocking, I’d be lucky to find a few hundred meters of new trail in a month.


Luckily, I’d gained some great skills for the lifestyle as I’d been working at Cove Bikes in order to fund my habit. So when I saw that some guy in Squamish was looking for help, I didn’t hesitate. I moved to Squampton, and BOOM! That was one incredible year. Trails like I didn’t know existed. Terrain I didn’t know could be ridden. Endless smooth lines through deep woods, and of course lots of exposed rock lines to keep me amused. And then one fine day some trials riders told me about a line on Goat Ridge they called Disneyland. Now we were talking adventure. Exploration of the like I hadn’t experienced since I was 12. It was all so new again. And the scale was such that we began to use helicopters to access it. My Cove Hummer went through so many changes that year, it was like a new bike every day.



Technology had a massive impact at this period in the mid to late 90’s. I moved back to the Shore, as there had been an explosion in trail building and the new bikes were able to access so much more terrain. Working at the Cove and at On Top, I went through a dozen full suspension Konas in a few blurry seasons. Some incredible friendships developed with some amazing personalities. But somewhere I started to feel like I was slipping into that same rut as before. The trails were getting stale, and I felt the wanderlust again. The Interior, which I’d flirted with for many years already, was starting to beckon. The only problem was how to afford to do it.


Cue the formation of Bush Pilot Biking. Folks had been urging me to start a touring service for a while. I mean, I was always the guy that knew where those trails were, so why not try charging for it? Oh wow…apparently there IS a demand for that kind of service. Not only that, but there are even people willing to sleep in the dirt and get lost in the woods exploring with me (take a bow, Jedi). I’d even been able to find a girlfriend who appreciated the lifestyle, and she came with a bloodthirsty dog that could ride a bike. The pace of exploration increased again as we expanded into Williams Lake, the Sunshine Coast, Vancouver Island, the Kootenays, and the Okanagan.


Now, I’ve got a new dog, a couple of Rocky Mtn.s and Chromags, Barb is still hanging around, we have a beautiful daughter, and I’m still exploring. If I figured out anything from all these years, it’s “hit ‘em where they ain’t.” Meaning that the best places to find singletrack are the areas that you don’t usually associate with riding, and is why I now live in the Okanagan and have had the best riding of my life in the past 3 years. Even as I’m writing this, a buddy just sent me some GPS tracks of about 250km of singletrack just a half hour from here that I haven’t touched yet. It's like every couple of years, my world expands on an order of magnitude. I go back to the Shore, and believe it or not, it seems small now.


There you go. 29 years of mountain biking adventure, glossed over in a superficial couple thousand words. But hey, this is supposed to be a somewhat regular column, so I'll be digging into the archives for some past adventures, and in the meantime I'll still be racking up new ones to share with you. So keep on pushing those boundaries, and I'll see you next month.

JS

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Editor's Note- The Smoke Room is a monthly column that will be running mid month through out the 2011 season. Stay tuned for many past and present adventures.