Ryan Ojerio (center, kneeling), a program coordinator for Northwest Youth Corps, works with Disciples of Dirt, a Eugene-based mountain biking club, at a trail building session on a section of the North Shore Trail along  the northern edge of Lookout Point Lake.

RIDERS UNEARTH TRAIL LESSONS

Mountain biking enthusiasts learn as they work in the Willamette forest

By MARK Baker

The Register-Guard

LOWELL - What were a bunch o folks wielding Pulaski axes and McLeod rakes doing Saturday in the Willamette National Forest about 8 miles east of here?

Trail building, of course. And that takes fancy rakes, hoes, axes and shovels that are normally used by firefighters to dig fire lines.

The International Mountain Biking Association is in town this weekend showing bike enthusiasts, land managers and forest service workers how to build and maintain multiuse trails for biking, hiking and horseback riding.

''With the growth of mountain biking, you've seen different problems with trails,'' said Ryan Ojerio, a program coordinator with the Eugene‑based Northwest Youth Corps, which helped coordinate Saturday's trail-building school on a section of the North Shore Trail along the northern edge of Lookout Point Lake.

Such problems include a lack of paid workers to maintain trails, heavy rains that damage paths and careless users.

Volunteers plan to spend the next year working on about a mile long section of the trail and rerouting it around Ivan Oaks County Park so mountain bikers won't have to fly right by campers, Ojerio said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers owns and manages the land where the North Shore Trail is and invited the IMBA to teach the weekend workshop. The Boulder, Colorado based IMBA has been involved in trail design and maintenance since 1988.

The husband-and-wife team of Mark Schmidt and Lora Woolner of Midland, Ontario, led the workshop. They travel the United States and Canada year round, helping build and maintain trails that mountain bike riders share with other trail users. Schmidt said.

Budget cuts have left the maintenance of such trails mostly to volunteers, he said. That's why about half of the 20 or so who showed up to work on Saturday were members of Eugene's Disciples of Dirt mountain biking club.

The group is dedicated to land access and trail maintenance. It's been around since the mid-1980s and has more than 100 members, said Dave Hallock, one of its founding members.

''We could see early on that if people didn't understand the basics of trail maintenance, our sport wasn't going to go anywhere,'' Hallock said. It's about giving back, he said.

He was building a retaining wall along North Shore Road that will help support the soil on an access trail connecting the county road to the North Shore Trail.

''This is what we like to do,'' Hallock said.

The group tries to teach responsible mountain biking, he said. They advocate ethics such as keeping trails in good condition by not creating ruts, and maintaining safety by watching out for blind corners where a family might be hiking.

The IMBA held a classroom session Saturday at the ranger station in Lowell on trail-building techniques, trail-design, controlling water flow and routine trail maintenance.

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