OCR Text |
Show A10 Castle Valley Review, April 2009 Mountain Bike Enthusiasts Find Happy Trails in Castle Valley Continued from Page A7.. out of town. I had been a little kid in Las Vegas, so doing that was like magic. I’d get out a little way and find some dirt roads or some cattle trails,” he said. After high school Fuzzy joined the Marine Corps and when an injury ended his enlistment, Fuzzy became more and more a part of the mountain bike movement. Along the way he has become a vocal proponent for the sport and against the environmental groups that fight not only mountain bikers, but all groups that want access to public land. He doesn’t mince words about his views on the conflicts between user groups and who he believes are behind the conflicts. “There’s not a real conflict. We’re being played against each other. Environmental groups like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the Southeastern Utah Wilderness Alliance, these guys have their agendas and their intentions and they know how to play the political game better than us commonsense, plain spoken folk. They’re really good at it. And what they’ve managed to do is get us all broken up into these user groups. You’ve got your ATV riders, you’ve got your two-wheeled guys, you’ve got your guys in the jeeps and you’ve got your guys in the rock crawlers. They keep us all separated and at each other and they like it. They’ll come out and take pictures where one or two guys trashed something on 4-wheelers and they’ll put that all over in the cycling press, in the cycling community. Through the years living up in Salt Lake that’s how they got to know me. I would write letters to the editor and say ‘wait a minute, we need to think about this.These are individuals doing this, not the entire class.’ But that class warfare is really effective and when you have people who all live in the city and really never get out here, it’s easy to manipulate them. All of those environmental groups get the majority of their money from California and the East Coast liberals who have never been here, never seen it, have no idea what their talking about. They see these bogus pictures of Delicate Arch with an oil well superimposed in the background and they say ‘oh, we’ve got to stop all this drilling,’ so they donate money and end up getting a lot done. What they end up doing is coming here and saying OK, we’ve got to protect the San Rafael Swell from all of you rednecks, so nobody gets to go there with anything even slightly mechanized,” Fuzzy said. Whether the rift between the “ even coming out of my mouth. I’m just a tree-hugging hippie, and when somebody calls me a tree hugger I become the classic ‘pacifist,’ I will pass-a-fist. I do not like being called that crap. The environmental lobby is the new communist movement. They want the federal government in control of our land and what we’re allowed to do. A free man does not obey an unjust law,” Fuzzy said. “Thomas Jefferson.” While Fuzzy admits his group still has its struggles with some 4-wheeler enthusiasts, he said it is individuals, not the group as a whole. “It’s always Before I was just some long hair mountain biker that worked in a bike shop. With my own shop I’m a respected local businessman and a pillar of my community. I go to city council meetings and they all know me. It’s funny, I’m the same dirt bag that I was. - Fuzzy Nance various public land user groups was created by the environmental groups or not, there is no doubt that the rift is there and Fuzzy said he looks for opportunities to come to a meeting of the minds with other groups. But sometimes it can get ugly. “Mountain bikers are starting to realize that we’re all on the same side. The struggle I have is to get some of the 4-wheeler people to realize that we’re all on the same side. The mountain bikers get together at Pioneer Park every Wednesday during the summer and head out in our group rides. We’ve been up there and had people come up and pick fights with us. They see mountain bikes and say ‘hey, there are those tree hugging hippies who want to ban us from everything, and they’ll start arguing with us. I say we have the same enemies, we need to be friends, we need to work together on this and it’s like those words aren’t and I can still walk normal, man, that’s a boring life.” The father of a 7 year old daughter, Abigail, Fuzzy said he can see already that his daughter is going to be just as passionate a rider as he is. “We went down to Klondike Bluffs and rode up to the top of that. Coming back down she realizes that if she lets it roll she hits these little nifties and she starts bouncing. So I hear her coming ssssssss. I get my camera out and she comes by and she’s caching three feet of air, three feet of air, four feet of air, then bam, on the rock. I get up to her and she really hit hard and she looks at me and she is mad. She walks over and looks her bike over first and I’m like, that’s my girl! She wants to get after it.” As the Castle Valley starts to become a “mountain bike scene” Fuzzy said he has his dream of what you will find here 10 years from now. “I want to see about twice as many trails as what we have now. About an hour range around Price I want to see develop. I want people to be able to come here for a four day weekend, be able to ride something different every day, have a great time, hang out in one of the clubs, see a movie, spend some money here and have such a good time that they come back several times through the year for a one day ride and a couple of long term trips every year,” he said. And as the festivals in the area grow both in number and in popularity, suddenly his years of talking and planning and working seem to be bearing some fruit. He can’t help but find some amusement in the fact that people are finally taking him seriously. “Before I was just some long hair mountain biker that worked in a bike shop. With my own shop I’m a respected local businessman and a pillar of my community. I go to city council meetings and they all know me. It’s funny, I’m the same dirt bag that I was,” he said with a laugh. “I’m loving it.” ” just the select individuals who do this. I go to the Carbon County ATV Club and they’re all on board. They want to help. They’re really cool people. In the mountain biking community when we have individuals on mountain bikes trashing stuff up, we’ll catch them and we’ll help them understand that they don’t want to do that anymore because they’re screwing us up,” he said. When it comes to why he rides mountain bikes, where the passion comes from for his sport, he said it has nothing to do with staying healthy. “I’ve never ridden for fitness in my life. I couldn’t care less. There’s a spook factor and a tickle that you get from pushing it. I really love that. I don’t jump off things like I used to, that’s why I hurt like I do now. I’m 43 years old and I’ve got arthritis in my back and getting down into my hips and my knees are broke up. But I’ve got some stories,” he said with a grin. “If I’m 90 TrailFest Aims to Provide Extreme Fun The Price Area Singletrack Society was started to help organize mountain bikers and get them working together to create trails in the area that could be enjoyed by everyone. The club’s website proclaims that P.A.S.S. is dedicated to “building and riding sweet singletrack…because dirt roads suck.” They have been working on building a web of trails for mountain bikers for years and those efforts are being rewarded as the area starts to draw the attention of mountain bikers from all over. As P.A.S.S. prepares for its annual Trailfest in May, Fuzzy Nance, owner of BicycleWorks and organizer of P.A.S.S., has found that after years of working largely unnoticed, suddenly things are exploding. The annual Trailfest event has been a loosely organized festival bringing hard core mountain bikers to the Price area for a couple of days of extreme riding on some of the best trails around. “We pretty much just do it. It’s not like a lot of festivals where they have advance signups and you pay a fee and you get a T-shirt. We’re kinda hard core. Nobody shows up who is not ready to ride some pretty serious trails. It’s not a beginners’ festival,” Fuzzy said. During previous Trailfests the group has planned for and been able to accommodate between 70 and 100 people for the event. But for this year’s festival, which is scheduled for May 1-3 in Price, that number is going to be far larger, so large that Fuzzy put out a desperate call for help as the days to the festival draw closer. In an email sent out to club members, Fuzzy spelled out what was awaiting organizers this year. “We’ve got around 100-200 or more people coming up from Moab, another 100 or so coming from the Provo area, all the Salt Lake City shops are pushing people our way, and now MountainBike Magazine ran a listing and picture in their May issue, ensuring another few hundred random attendees,” Fuzzy said in his message. The schedule of events for Trailfest includes: May 1: Packet pickup at BicycleWorks, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Trail rides leave Pioneer Park at 4 p.m., trailhead at 4:20 p.m. May 2: Breakfast/Packet pickup at Pioneer Park from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. Rides and shuttles leave the park at 10 a.m. Mellow, intermediate, serious and idiotic rides are planned. 7 p.m. at Holiday Inn in concert will be Barrel & the MADloveSPELL. May 3: Breakfast at Pioneer Park at 9 a.m. At least two trail rides are planned. For more information go to passtrails.com. |