Saturday is National Trails Day, a day set aside for paying homage to the nation’s more than 200,000 miles of trail. In most cases, that involves grabbing a rake, a pickax, a shovel and sprucing up the trails that on the other 364 days of the year we love to death. It’s a day underscoring that without volunteer labor, our trail systems simply wouldn’t exist. Last year, for instance, 190,350 volunteer hours were logged at nearly 2,000 registered National Trails Day events. That represents roughly $3.9 million in labor that our cash-strapped federal, state and local land managers simply couldn’t afford to pay for.
Tag Archives: Briar Chapel
Support your local bike shop: A tale from the trail
Hello, and welcome to GGNC Playhouse. Today’s a one-act performance, “Buy Local: Your Race Could Depend On It,” is a re-creation of an actual event that occurred at Saturday’s 6 BC endurance mountain bike race at Briar Chapel south of Chapel Hill. The scene opens with a long shot of several mountain bikers coming up to pit row. The riders, nearing the end of a 7-mile lap, are slowly pedaling up the hill, all except one who’s pushing his bike. As the despondent running cyclist nears the pit, Dave Naderman, manager of the Trek Bicycles of Raleigh, manning the store’s mobile service center parked near the start/finish heads down to see what’s wrong. Let’s listen.