Northeast TW mountain bike meetup at Kingdom Trails (VT) - June 25-26

I might be up at Kingdom this coming Saturday 5/28

 

Was on Cape this weekend and did a pretty sweet mixed terrain gravel bike ride. Talk about some smooth flowing single track.

https://www.strava.com/activities/7185279357

 

34 miles. Nice!

 

The cush core went in easier than I thought. Well it did until I had to redo one tire! It helps when you put the tire on in the right direction!

 

I've never used them, but from what I've seen, they aren't a walk in the park to install - glad it went relatively easy!

 

I went with the lighter weight Cushcore XC. That may have been some of the reason that it wasn't too bad to install. I mostly just did it to help with the tire burping.

 

Just in case any of you are considering KT season passes…

Also, VMBA membership (an option while buying KT pass) gives you access to a whole bunch of other stuff including passes to some of the lift served places (Burke, Killington, Stratton, etc.) and supports VT cycling.

 

Were you having issues with tire burping or just installed as a pre-emptive? I haven't burped a tire yet, but I do tend to run mine on the firm side so I doubt that will ever be a concern for me.

 

I was burping the front tire mainly on slower areas with rocks. The 1st time (and loudest) it happened was when I with you guys. I tried putting more air in but didn't like the way the tires gripped so I figured this was a way of getting the best of both worlds.

 

What tires are you running? Also, did the bike shop set them up tubeless or did you do it? If you keep having the issues after the cushcore, another wrap of rim tape may help seat the bead tighter.

 

They were setup tubless from the factory. I went for a short ride today and they were all good.

 

Anyone riding around Springfield or Hartford tomorrow (Tuesday) after work? I'm in town and would rather not ride unfamiliar trail systems alone, and potentially at night...'cause alone on new trails often = kinda lost! I'll be in East Windsor until 5.

 

Wish I could!

 

Nah my hand is wrapped up for another couple days. Poison ivy like a bastard.

Aside from not having a MTB with knobby wheels anyway

 

I hope you all have a great time enjoying the Vermont countryside and some analog exercise. I visit East Burke often (I have relatives that had owned a namesake Inn there for 40+ yrs) I wish I had that weekend available to go and get dirty! Not to be a Debbie-downer, but I wanted to share this article from the NYT about impacts. I don't want to get involved with politics about it, but some ppl may not be aware. TLDR: Ride with gratitude! Have Fun! And be cool hunny bunny.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/23/travel/vermont-mountain-biking.html

 

Can’t read the article, hopefully nothing important.

 

Neither could I (NYT paywall) but it seems to be about the dispute with landowners and trail users. Ride with gratitude, kill’em with kindness, don’t be a prick. All guidelines we should follow anyway.

 

Text posted below. Not sure how I get it, I don't pay for it.


Summer of cycling


In Northern Vermont, Trying to Smooth the Ride for Mountain Biking

The Kingdom Trails Association has built a popular network of biking
paths using private land. Now it’s trying to make sure the community is
happy, too.

*

A rider on Darling Hill Road, which connects several trails in the
Kingdom Trails Association network, as well as local inns, a bike shop,
and spots for espresso and beer.
A rider on Darling Hill Road, which connects several trails in the
Kingdom Trails Association network, as well as local inns, a bike shop,
and spots for espresso and beer.Credit...Greta Rybus for The New York Times

A rider on Darling Hill Road, which connects several trails in the
Kingdom Trails Association network, as well as local inns, a bike shop,
and spots for espresso and beer.

By Heather Hansman
May 23, 2022

Some 15,000 years ago, when the Laurentide ice sheet receded from
Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, it left behind an esker, an upside-down
riverbed of well-drained sand. Unlike the root-choked granite that
ripples across most of northern New England, the hills in this area
close to the Canadian border are smooth under the wheels of a mountain bike.

In the late 1980s, when the sport of mountain biking was nascent, riders
around the town of Burke noticed the contours of the landscape and
started connecting bits of old logging roads by building trails across
neighboring properties. “We didn’t even know what single-track was at
the time, but we knew the riding was good,” said John Worth, the former
owner of East Burke Sports, the local ski and bike shop.

Riders on the Kingdom Trails include Georgia Gould, an Olympic bronze
medalist.

The trail builders had several important things going for them, in
addition to geology. Vermont, where recreation often happens on private
land, has a particularly friendly limited liability statute that
protects landowners when accidents happen. And the nature of the state’s
sparsely populated Northeast Kingdom, which encompasses three counties
in the state’s northeastern corner, trended toward neighborly. It’s
tradition to let people hunt or hike across your land. When Mr. Worth
started asking locals if he and his friends could build bike trails on
their property, they all said yes.

In 1994, the trail network became the Kingdom Trails Association
<https://www.kingdomtrails.org/>, a nonprofit that links more than 100
miles of carefully built biking routes across 104 landowners’
properties. As the network expanded, the smooth, beautiful riding
brought in bikers from far beyond the Kingdom, who pay a daily, monthly
or yearly membership fee to ride the trails. For the past 10 years, the
Trails Association’s membership numbers have grown an average of 15
percent each year, up to more than 140,000 in 2020. “I had no idea it
would be so successful,” Mr. Worth said.

So successful that mountain biking became the biggest economic driver in
the Northeast Kingdom, which does not have the major downhill ski
resorts that bring money into more southern parts of Vermont. The
association estimates that it brings $10 million in revenue to the area
each year, which is significant for a region where 15.9 percent of
residents live in poverty, and the jobless rate — 4.7 percent in March —
is nearly double that of the rest of the state. As traditional
industries like logging and agriculture have faded in the Kingdom,
recreational tourism has brought 28 new biking-related businesses to the
area, including a good local coffee shop and a tiki bar at one of the
trailheads.

Taking a break at Mike&rsquo;s Tiki Bar in East Burke, which sits near
the trailhead for one of the mountain biking paths.

Taking a break at Mike’s Tiki Bar in East Burke, which sits near the
trailhead for one of the mountain biking paths.Credit...Greta Rybus for
The New York Times

Taking a break at Mike&rsquo;s Tiki Bar in East Burke, which sits near
the trailhead for one of the mountain biking paths.

From a bike, it’s easy to see why. The trails on Darling Hill, the
centerpiece of the network, ramble through old timber stands, and past
19th-century farmsteads. Stop to breathe and you’ll get long-ranging
views of the Willoughby Gap, the glacier-carved lake to the north, along
with sweeping green fields and wide red barns.

From the hill you can drop down into the bucolic hamlet of East Burke
through stands of beech and birch. Grab a coffee at Café Lotti’s, where
local artisans sell pottery and maple syrup. You might pass the resident
moose, which local children have named Gertrude, or get passed by the
Olympic bronze-winning biker Georgia Gould, who moved here with her
family in 2018, and says the riding is even better than she thought it
would be.

But not everyone in the Kingdom rides or wants a latte, especially in a
place that has long prided itself on localism. And as ridership
increased, so did congestion and conflict. According to Martha Feltus,
who represents Burke in the Vermont House of Representatives, it’s
caused local price inflation. New residents, including coronavirus
transplants, moved in or bought vacation homes that they turned into
short term rentals, significantly changing the housing market. “It’s
happened really quickly, and you can tell there’s kind of a culture
clash,” said Chris Manges, an avid mountain biker who grew up in East
Burke, and now teaches school there.

Part of the clash is that the positive economic growth often goes to
businesses in town, or to Airbnb owners, while the negative land use
impacts hit volunteer landowners, or long-term locals who may not bike,
and who might only see traffic or trouble. The vast majority of riders
were well behaved, but some were swimming in resident’s stock ponds, or
stopping for beer breaks on their porches. “If there’s a massive number
of people riding here, even if only one percent of them are jerks, that
can still be a lot of people,” said Des Hertz, another public-school
teacher who also chairs One Burke, a community development group.

Abby Long became the executive director of the Kingdom Trails
Association in 2018. She said that as soon as she arrived she could tell
that trouble was brewing. “I knew the second I landed that it wasn’t
sustainable,” she said. “The day we opened for the season I wanted to
run out there and yell ‘Slow down!’” to the mountain bikers.

Then, in 2019, the tensions between local landowners and bikers came to
a head. After a particularly bad interaction in which a visiting biker
yelled at a landowner for riding a horse on her own property, three
landowners pulled their property out of the trail network. Their choice,
which was well within their rights, bifurcated the trails on Darling
Hill, and set off a wave of worries that the trails would close down.

Abby Long has been the executive director of the Kingdom Trails
Association since 2018 and is trying to better community relations.

I trailed Ms. Long by bike on an overcast Tuesday afternoon, pedaling up
carefully switchbacked climbing trails and then rolling through swooping
downhills. She waved to a farmer clunking by on a tractor before we
turned onto the meandering trails behind her East Burke home. She
explained the balance that the trails association is trying to strike.
How the closures were a wake-up call to change their system and support
the local community if they wanted the network to be sustainable.

The association is a nonprofit that depends on handshake agreements with
private landowners. Because of those limited liability laws, landowners
legally can’t be financially compensated for their use. But Kingdom
Trails is also a major player in the local economy. Businesses rely on
it to bring in the visitors and it has become one of the biggest
employers in town, employing nearly 40 people to build trails, run the
visitor center and keep the trails safe. The challenges are unique
because the associations is beholden to so many landowners, but as
ridership has grown, the central issue that has cropped up is similar to
what other towns where recreation has become the major economic face: As
the pandemic has changed where people live and travel, and as interest
in outdoor recreation has skyrocketed, according to the Outdoor Industry
Association, how can they simultaneously attract new visitors while
protecting the viability and livability of their community?

The market at the crossroads

In the back room of the East Burke Market, right at the heart of the
trail network, Kellie Greer and Burton Hinton say they can feel the
tricky balance, as they try to adapt to the changes, too. They both grew
up in the Kingdom, and Ms. Greer worked at the market for 24 years
before the two bought it in 2019. “Burton was a farmer. He ended up
selling his cows and that gave us the equity to purchase the store,” Ms.
Greer said.

Since they bought it, they’ve brought in craft beer and wasabi rice
crackers to cater to the visiting riders’ tastes. But they are also a
touch point for year-round locals who buy their groceries there, and
come in daily for breakfast sandwiches, so they hear about the traffic,
and the errant bikers ripping up farmers fields. “There are definitely
growing pains, we’re sympathetic to both sides,” Mr. Hinton said. The
store owners have hired more employees because of the biking crowds, but
they know their employees are having a harder time finding housing.

“The current crisis is housing for sure,” said Ms. Hertz of the One
Burke group when asked about the biggest problems in the community. “At
first it was disdain for bikers and trails, and landowners being upset
riders weren’t being respectful, but now there are so many different
factors.” She said that as biking has brought money and change to the
area it has exacerbated existing political and economic divides, which
need to be addressed to keep the community healthy. “It’s caused a lot
of people’s pent-up emotions to come out, which I think is important,
all those voices need to be heard,” she said.


Pumping the brakes

On our ride, I asked Ms. Long how they find consensus about diffusing
the tension. “Oh we don’t,” she said and laughed. “We just try to
listen, and explain what we’re doing.”

The coronavirus provided a surprising silver lining for the trails
association. When the border with Canada closed, it temporarily slowed
down the flow of riders — Canadians previously had been almost 40
percent of visitors — and gave the organization a chance to pump the
brakes. The group started a landowner advisory committee to try to get
out ahead of any other trail removals. Ms. Long began writing grants on
behalf of the town, which received federal funding to improve its roads
and add bike lanes. She started a monthly public meeting, so locals
could air ideas and grievances.

To lessen the financial burden, the trails association kept memberships
for Kingdom residents to $100 a year for a family, no matter how many
members there are (daily riders pay $30 per person for adults). Ms. Long
is now trying to find ways to compensate the landowners, through
indirect things like carbon credits, and lobbying to change state tax
law for “current use,” a designation that give landowners tax breaks for
certain kinds of industry, and which currently applies to logging but
not recreation. That would be a benefit to the landowners who let the
association use their land, and Ms. Long said, could be replicable and
beneficial in many places where land use is changing.

One of Ms. Long’s first moves as executive director, even before the
landowners pulled out, was to apply for a United States Department of
Agriculture-funded capacity study, to try to identify the worst pain
points. The study
<https://segroup.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=ff307acd023440d585c3c62aec25b47c>
found that the trails were at 80 percent capacity, but that the surrounding infrastructure, like parking lots, bathrooms and connecting roads were at 120 percent capacity. The association built new parking lots, and trail linkages to keep riders off the roads. They started a shuttle service from the town of East Burke to the most popular trails. Through a trails committee, which Mr. Manges is part of, they reached out to landowners in a wider radius, and started to build trails in surrounding towns like East Haven, which now has its own local craft brewery, Dirt Church. <https://dirtchurchvt.wpcomstaging.com/>

The association also tried to put the onus of responsibility onto the
visiting riders, a hard thing to do in a vacation town, where people may
stay for only a weekend. Ms. Long said that after the trail closures,
Kingdom Trails immediately shifted all its marketing efforts into
education. It adopted a maxim from a nearby trail network, “Ride with
Gratitude,” to encourage good behavior, and remind visitors that it’s a
rare privilege to ride on pristine private land — one they shouldn’t
screw up. Now, in addition to trail marker signs, there are also signs
to ride single file, and respect landowners.

Now, the border with Canada is open again and the whole town feels like
it’s waiting to see what the summer bike season will bring. On a trail
called Sidewinder, Mr. Manges and Tiaan van der Linde, another local
teacher and biker, talk about issues like the increased traffic they’ll
have to contend with and how the trails association might have more
positive impact on the community. They want more affordable housing;
ways to train local kids for jobs that will keep them around; trails
that wind out to towns like West Burke, spreading the wealth.

They know that you don’t just get beautiful trails with no one on them
or an influx of tourist dollars without crowds. And, like riding a bike,
you have to make a million micro-movements to keep yourself on track for
the long term. “We’re trying to plan for what we want instead of
reacting to what’s happening to us, but you can’t predict the future,”
Mr. van der Linde said.

He points his bike back toward the trailhead and we swoop around the
Burkelyn trail, green fields rolling out under us into the distance as
we gather speed, riding with gratitude.

Heather Hansman is the author of the recent book “Powder Days” and a
contributing editor at//Outside//magazine. You can follow her on Twitter
at @hhansman.

 

Thanks! Interesting read for sure…. Hopefully the trail network stays open!

 

I am not a KT local but I have spent a lot of time up there and have had a season pass for the last 5 or 6 years, this was the original rumor. From my understanding this is false and it is what KT wants people to believe. I could be wrong though. Darling hill side just doesn't work well without those trails that got closed. There is still some good trails there but having to ride up and down the road to connect them all just isn't as fun as it used to be.