News
Local bike club struggles with volunteer shortage for trail maintenance
By: Alison Patton
Posted on:
ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — Paul Schulz guides his electric chainsaw through a large fallen tree blocking the Sundown bike trail near Dow Lake Dam.
“I like the mechanics of it all, and I like to try and calculate where the forces are with the tree, you know the weight loads and things like that,” said Schulz, a retired firefighter.
As an Athens Bicycle Club member, he knows there is a need for more people who can clear trails.
“It would be nice to do less sawing and more riding,” Schulz said.
The club maintains over 120 miles of trails throughout Athens County, and that number is growing as the Baileys trail system expands.
Club President Bob West said there are between 40 and 120 people in the club, and they are still looking for more people to join.
To do that, he said, the club needs more donations so it can get the word out.
“One of the things we hear from a lot of people is, ‘Athens has a bike club?’” West said. “They don’t even know we exist and they don’t know the work we do.”
West believes workers will come once people learn about the club through flyers, pamphlets and ABC trail crew T-shirts.
The donations will also be used to buy equipment for volunteers.
“We need to be able to hand them safety glasses, hardhats or bike helmets or whatever they need, because we’re way past the point where we can expect our volunteer workforce to come in and pay for all their own stuff,” West said.
The club started in the ’70s, around when mountain biking was beginning to become popular, but there were no trails around for West and others to legally ride.
So the group got permission to build trails at Lake Hope State Park.
“They liked the trail so much that 10 years later we had 26 miles of trails at Lake Hope, the first state park in Ohio that had legal mountain bike trails built by mountain bikers,” said Malcolm Idleman, another club volunteer.
Of the 120 miles they maintain, 50 of them were hand-built by the club.
“We built the trails not for other people. We built them for us, and other people get to use them,” Idleman said.
The trails have to be cleared by someone because they’ll disappear if not.
“If we don’t maintain these trails, we don’t get to ride them,” West said. “So it’s kind of like we’re the main trail users, but we’re doing it for trail users.”