Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz change name
Group aims to recruit all outdoor enthusiasts as the Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship
Beginning Tuesday, the 24-year-old nonprofit Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz will go by a new name: in a shift that the group says reflects its changing mission, the organization is now the Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship.
“We want to have this more inclusive accessible organization so that all trail users can learn about trail stewardship,” said Matt De Young, executive director of Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship. “We don’t want people to be locked into their use group… we want people to think of themselves as general trail stewards or users, rather than ‘hey I’m a hiker, or mountain biker.’”
The nonprofit has already been building, maintaining and stewarding hiking, mountain biking and equestrian trails. The name change, De Young said, reflects how the group’s mission has shifted since it began in 1997.
“Mountain Bikers of Santa Cruz was really founded as a social club,” De Young said. “It was mostly about riding bikes, drinking beer, a little bit of advocacy work in there. And that kind of shifted around the early 2000s with new leadership and the focus really became around access.”
The name-change decision
was also made in part to recruit more volunteers to work trails, who aren’t mountain bikers.
“We want to bring people together in taking care of those
spaces,” De Young said.
As part of the nonprofit’s shift, the group will also begin doing work in spaces outside Santa Cruz County. Though the focus of their work remains local, De Young said many volunteers
live in neighboring counties. The organization wants to bring stewardship to those places, as well.
“The county lines start to feel a little bit arbitrary,” De Young said. “We want to focus more on the Santa Cruz Mountain region which is already super connected with parks spanning different counties and great connectivity there — we just
saw more opportunity to lean into that and accomplish more.”
Last year the nonprofit raised $200,000 dollars to support California State Parks in rehabbing and rebuilding fire-damaged spaces, such as Fall Creek, the northern part of Henry Cowell State Park. Santa Cruz Mountains Trail Stewardship
crews are assisting state park employees in remediating burned areas, and hazardous trees.
The group is also on the ground working with Bureau of Land Management at the to-be-opened Cotoni-Coast Dairies National Monument. De Young said he hopes the new monument will welcome visitors sometime in 2022.