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Black Hill, Morro Bay & Santa Margarita Lake Trail Work (2 events)
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Don't Be A Kook

Time-sensitive trail issue? Post it to the CCCMB email list.


Improve Your Ride through Trail Work


Bring your bike and immediately reap the benefits after a few hours of trail work. Maintaining our local trails improves the rideable surface for you and your bike. It also helps improve your skills by increasing your familiarity with individual trail features.



Keep it Single

By trying to make room for other users of the trail or to avoid a puddle, riders who swerve off the trail and into the surrounding landscape damage slow-growing vegetation and help the trail become too wide and overly disturbed. So, help preserve the "single" in "singletrack."

Most riders know that when encountering a puddle, you should ride straight through rather than going around and widening the trail. A group of mountain bikers in Fruita, Colorado, have also recognized how riding off trail damages their delicate desert landscape, so they offer some tips on how to promote "trail integrity." The following info was excerpted from the website of Over the Edge Sports, the organization that developed and promotes this campaign in Fruita.

Learn the Singletrack Lean

The rule of "yield to everyone" isn't right! Too often, riders who meet at a point in the trail just ride OFF TRAIL around each other. That is NOT a yield at all; that's "I'm too much in a hurry to be slowed by you." In most cases, the rule applies to allow the rider moving uphill to pass because paused downhill riders can more easily restart their ride than paused uphill riders.

Don't roll off trail to pass other users; instead, follow these simple steps:

  • STOP your bike... step a foot out of the trail off to the side (without crushing vegetation) and 
  • LEAN your bike and/or slide it a bit to the side. 
  • The rider you are YEILDING TO then can pass without leaving the track. AWESOME!  

If we simply pass each other by riding off the trail and into the landscape, we're essentially creating a trail that's two bikes wide and, thus, NOT SINGLETRACK. Trails wide enough for two bikes to pass each other without one having to stop are called "roads." Keep Singletrack Single is our rule. 

Thanks for being a part of that passion for narrow, beautiful trails.


Remember to "keep it single" at Johnson Ranch 

Practice effective bike handling skills to maintain the integrity of our newest trail and preserve the "single" in "singletrack."  Riding off trail at Johnson Ranch and elsewhere in SLO County, especially at the height of summer, destroys fragile vegetation in our arid environment.




photo by Bill Mulder






  
Riding on a saturated trail is very bad because 
it compromises a trail's smooth, rideable surface 
(photos: Tim Sawchuck and Paul Reinhardt)  


Use a Bike Bell to Announce Your Presence to Others

Are you hearing bells as you travel our SLO County trails? CCCMB, SLOPOST, several local bike shops (Arts, CBO, Foothill Cyclery, Pedal Power, and Wally's)
, and the City of SLO have teamed up to fund and develop bike bell boxes for several local trails to promote good neighbor behavior. Just another way we're trying to keep everyone on trail and getting along so we can all enjoy the trails in the way we prefer, whether hiking, cycling, or riding horseback.




Bell box at summit of Cerro San Luis
photo by Doug Carscaden

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