It's OK to trail in this sport

Don Cook's singletrack mind makes Crested Butte a mountain bike mecca

Eric Payne of Crested Butte rides the Upper Loop, a star attraction in the former mining town's array of trails.

Article and photo by Scott Willoughby, The Denver Post 

CRESTED BUTTE — With a satisfied glint in his eyes, Don Cook points to the web of singletrack mountain bike trails surrounding his home in downtown Crested Butte and describes them as if they were works of art.

"The pictures are almost better without people on the trail," Cook says. "There's just so much flow to the trail, so many places where you can capture the character and get a real good feel for it just by looking at it."

The specific trail of reference is Crested Butte's "Upper Loop," considered the ultimate introduction to riding in Colorado's mountain bike mecca. And while Cook may not exactly qualify as a modern-day Michelangelo, he certainly deserves a significant share of credit for the cycling renaissance that rolled into the former mining town in the late 1970s and made fat tire riding a permanent fixture on the map. For starters, he built the Upper Loop.

"Tommy 'Crash' Craddock and I found this nice singletrack access trail a rancher had built for cattle grazing and I saw the potential to make it way better and way longer," Cook, 50, said during last weekend's Fat Tire Bike Week celebration. "For three days we went up there with rakes and kicked it in, then showed it to the handful of buddies who had clunker bikes and started riding it in. The Upper Loop trail was the start of trail building in 1980."

The self-proclaimed hippie and eventual founder of the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association (CBMBA) along with his wife, Kay Peterson-Cook, had no idea he was embarking on what has since become a 30-year mission to establish and maintain a series of more than 400 miles of dirt trails in the vicinity, building Crested Butte's summer identity along the way.

"We didn't tell anybody and didn't ask anybody. We just needed more riding closer to town because there wasn't much," Cook said of his early trail-building days. "I got a lot done, but I could see the potential for a lot more. So in the fall of '83, I thought,

An Upper Loop trailhead sign near Mt. Crested Butte shows the current travel management plan, which is closed to motorized use. (Scott Willoughby, The Denver Post )

well, let's start a mountain bike club so we could try to get other people involved and make it look like we knew what we were doing. We are definitely the oldest mountain bike club in the world."

The technological disadvantages of Cook and company's early-era clunkers, or balloon bikes, as they called them, worked to their favor when it came to trail design. With rigid forks, single speeds and bike weight pushing 40 pounds, the few riders who latched onto the sport in its infancy were looking for rolling, contoured terrain that suited their steeds, not steep pitches that demanded pushing the uphills and ravaged stock coaster brakes on the way back down.

By the time the U.S. Forest Service caught on to what was happening in 1989, Cook handed over more than 200 miles of trail — all of it meeting USFS code. Before long, the trails were numbered and catalogued.

Historic cross-pollination

Crested Butte is something of an unheralded hero of the sport outside of Colorado. While the local hippies were rebuilding "paper boy" bikes in the late 1970s to cope with the potholes on dirt streets that rarely saw grading, crews from Marin County in California were fine-tuning their machines for races and adding gears to the equation for uphill climbs.

It wasn't until the Californians read a story in GQ magazine about the guys from Crested Butte riding over 12,705-foot Pearl Pass to steal Aspen's women that the two cycling scenes decided to cross-pollinate.

Don Cook is most responsible for his town's 400-plus miles of trails.

"The Marin groups had the technology, Crested Butte had the terrain," Cook said. "Had they not come to Crested Butte to test their wares, would it have become a national sport in the '80s and a worldwide sport in late '80s, early '90s? No."

The mountain bike scene, including the annual Fat Tire Bike Week that began in 1982, has since seen its heyday in Crested Butte. But the sport — some 50 million strong, according to a study conducted by the Boulder-based International Mountain Biking Association (IMBA) and component manufacturer Shimano — continues to evolve on the technological front, creating a fresh set of terrain conflicts.

Development and demise

Renegade trail builders nationwide seek new trails that suit the modern definition of mountain biking, downhill terrain that matches the long-travel, full-suspension shock absorbers and disc brakes that encourage the high speeds and aerial stunts of "freeride" cycling. Ski resorts such as Winter Park, Keystone and SolVista provide much of the legal freeride terrain built on public lands, yet illegal trails that fail to meet USFS and Bureau of Land Management code continue to propagate.

"Anywhere you look in the state, you'll probably find some trails that people are burning in with their bikes, sort of a 'shoot first and ask questions later' mentality," IMBA spokesman Mark Eller said. "It gets old, and it's not good for anyone. . . . Our whole mission is figure out how to get trails to last longer than a season or two. That starts with getting permission from the landowners."

As a precursor even to IMBA, the CBMBA learned the value of pre-approved trails perhaps before anyone else. And that process is once again being put to the test as the surrounding Gunnison National Forest revamps its Travel Management Plan in the coming months. Comment period recently closed on an updated plan that could lead to continued development or demise of many miles of singletrack trails in the area.

"CBMBA deserves a lot of credit for where mountain biking advocacy is today," Cook said. "Am I worried about trail closures? No. If I sound cocky, I don't mean to. I'm just confident the agencies don't have the money or time to change it. Besides, we're talking about the noblest invention of mankind — the bicycle."

Scott Willoughby: 303-954-1993 or swilloughby@denverpost.com