We Get the Scoop on the Future of IMBA from Executive Director, Dave Wiens [Podcast #103]

Greg Heil: I think you’ve probably covered this in a few different ways but since I’ve posed this question in a recent article, I want to ask you as well, Dave, but what do you think IMBA needs to do to be successful? Is it mainly attracting more people or narrowing your focuses that you’ve discussed, or is there something else as well?

Dave Wiens: Well, yeah, I think the narrowed focus and really focusing on what’s important to mountain bikers, we need … Not that we haven’t, but we need to become an organization of mountain bikers, an organization mountain bikers are proud to be a part of, and so we have to give them that reason why.

IMBA is criticized, has been criticized in the past for sanitizing trails, maybe not pursuing, you know, accessing Wilderness, a few things like that. It gets written about a lot, it gets read a lot, so we don’t really control our messaging so much, but what I’ve found especially since I’ve got to meet some of the Trail Solutions guys, we’ve got some of the most progressive builders and progressive riders anywhere. Tyson Swasey and Randy Spangler, the whole crew of guys that are just building phenomenal trails, and they’re certainly anything but sanitized.

I think the sanitized part, and we get accused of it around here too in Gunnison Trails, comes from some of the trail maintenance work that we do. If you take an old eroded trail and you fix it up, it does become an easier trail to ride. There’s always a few riders that like that old school sort of whatever the weather does to the trail, you just leave it, it makes it harder, it makes it gnarlier. But the endgame in that is a huge rut that nobody rides and people start riding around it, so I think that that part of what IMBA’s reputation is is undeserved because IMBA built some phenomenal trails out there.

I do think it’s important that this organization and they’ve done this, they’re into all trails. They’re into beginner trails. Absolute, simple, wide, smooth, all the way up to some super gnarly stuff and everything in between, and that’s important for I think everybody just to open their minds to is that not every trail was made for them in particular, and we need to have that full spectrum represented so that every mountain biker has their place to ride out there.

Greg Heil: Yeah, if I can jump in there, I have heard this accusation of IMBA sanitizing trails so I decided to look into it about a year ago. I started a forum thread, started talking to people. I couldn’t actually find any good examples of that. So my idea went nowhere. IMBA builds beginner-friendly trails but is that sanitizing an existing trail? No. And if there’s a trail that’s eroded and isn’t sustainable, is fixing it to be sustainable sanitizing? Not that either

You know generally when we talk about sanitizing trails it’s people taking obstacles out of a trail because that makes it challenging and they’re trying to make it easier and more accessible, and as far as I found, I think it was a pretty false accusation against IMBA. I just want to throw my two cents in there.

Dave Wiens: No, thanks. I appreciate that. But no, to be valuable to mountain bikers, we need to be part of, and I say part of, not IMBA, doesn’t have to do this all of our own but we need to be part of putting great mountain biking trails on the ground all across this country, and we have an arm of our organization called Trail Solutions and they do fine work.

As I said earlier, there’s a whole bunch of really good professional trail contractors out there. There are also clubs and organizations who have the experience and the leadership in their organizations to do great volunteer projects. So if IMBA can just help foster that … And certainly in some places maybe the IMBA involvement isn’t great, in other places it can be IMBA start to finish, but promoting and getting great trail riding on the ground all across the country, also working hard to make sure that we try not to lose any more trails that we already have access to or that we preserve lands where we might want future trails to happen and to work towards new trails.

The San Diego Mountain Biking Association was just telling us about a great system of trails on Forest Service lands in the Cleveland National Forest that they’re working toward. I think it’s somewhere in the area of maybe 25 or 30 miles or more of brand new trail. They’ll be opening up mountain biking that area and that’s just one example.

IMBA needs to be part of every conversation that they can that pushes mountain biking forward in the realm of places to ride and the trails that we ride on, because still there are places in the US that don’t have the trails, and Bentonville, Arkansas was a really interesting place to go to last November for the IMBA World Summit. I don’t know how many people I came across there that were locals to Bentonville. I just asked them how they came to start mountain biking, they said, “Well, I never thought about mountain biking, and then they started building these trails, and I saw a few mountain bikers and eventually I was interested enough to try mountain bike and now I’m hooked,” and these were die-hard mountain bikers that wouldn’t have ever become mountain bikers had trails just not been built in their neighborhood.

I don’t think that that’s an anomaly. I think that any place around the country where we put in high-quality trails for mountain biking, people are going to ride. What I’m really encouraged about is what’s happening with NICA, and mountain biking just continues to get pushed further and further down to younger and younger kids.

Even when our kids were young and now they’re 17 and 19, we couldn’t find good bikes for the kids. They were heavy. They weren’t geared right. The cranks were long, the brake levers were adult brake levers, little hands couldn’t use them. Now there’s all kinds of great kids bikes for every age, and parents are putting their kids on Striders, so I think the kids are the future of all cycling because those first bicycle experiences are now going to take place on the dirt.

I think parents are just a little less comfortable letting their kids just go out and explore the world on the streets like a lot of us did, but they’re going to be perfectly happy taking them when they’re really young to a mountain bike playground on a Strider or on their first pedal bike, and as those kids become more and more experienced, they’re going to wonder where that trail goes off to. Even if it’s somewhere in the Midwest and it’s only a few miles long, they’re going to get that feeling of riding singletrack.

I think that IMBA can be very relevant and help promote trail development and quality places to ride mountain bikes all across this country, from those community trail systems which are the bread and butter for most of us, it’s where we ride most of the time, to those great epic trails, the Sandy Ridges, the Hartman Rocks, the Crested Butte, Lake Tahoe, places like that, the iconic good stuff, and everything in-between. So we certainly don’t want to ever focus solely on one type of riding. The full spectrum is important to us and we’re just going to keep working toward it. It’s too good of a sport. Too valuable. Too many people. Mountain biking changes lives for the better. I truly believe that.

Greg Heil: If there’s one thing you could ask our readers to do as we wrap up, what would it be?

Dave Wiens: Well, I would ask everybody to keep the passion alive for mountain biking, that I know is there, and maybe just try to understand a different viewpoint every now and then, and sometimes agree to disagree and keep it civil and drop back down to that point where we recognize that we’re all mountain bikers at the base level. I think that’s important.

Truly, advocacy has taught me that. When I first came in, I think I had the mountain biking blinders on a little bit, and as I worked around here and worked with people and learned things, and my vision started to expand, and I started to see things from other perspectives, and I think that’s really important … I encourage every mountain biker to go for a hike on a trail that’s busy with mountain bikers just to know what that’s like, and it’ll change your perspective just a little bit.

You know, be a little bit more open and you know what, we have places now which we didn’t have before that we can really let our bikes go, and we can ride hard. There’s bike parks, there’s directional trails. . .most places we can really get after it, but know also when you’re on a multiple use trail at 10:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning and there’s families and equestrians and hikers and all kinds of folks out there, there’s a time and place. It’s important to know when to say when and now more than ever, we have those opportunities to do that. We also need to be respectful as there’s more trail users all the time. Trail use is doing nothing but going up, and that’s all categories, walkers, mountain bikers, the whole nine, so just be respectful out there, have a lot of fun, and keep on pedaling.

Greg Heil: Well Dave, thanks so much for taking some time to share your vision for IMBA, your vision for mountain biking, and some just great insights on where we’re going from here. Stoked for the future.

Dave Wiens: Thanks, Greg.

Greg Heil: And we will definitely continue to write about access issues on Singletracks.com, something we are quite passionate about. Singletracks also has been a long-time IMBA corporate sponsor, and we’ll continue to sponsor IMBA, continue to write about IMBA and trail access issues around the nation, and around the world. So for more on this, check out Singletracks. Thanks for listening, guys. Peace.