WOODWORK LESSONS
ED RIDES VANCOUVER'S INFAMOUS NORT SHORE TRAILS WITH A CREW OF LEGENDS FOR AN EDUVATION IN MTB HISTORY AND BIKE HANDLING
Working for MBUK, I’ve become accustomed to meeting pro riders, but today is one of those days when I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. Here I am, riding Mount Fromme on Vancouver’s North Shore with Wade Simmons, Geoff Gulevich and Todd ‘Digger’ Fiander – two legendary freeriders and the world’s most prolific trail builder, who together have left a considerable mark on the sport we love.
Through the pages of magazines and films like the Kranked and New World Disorder series, I grew up in awe of British Columbia’s trails. This was particularly true of those on the North Shore, with their teetering ladder bridges, terrifying cliff drops and near-vertical rock chutes. The distinct photographic style employed by John Gibson and Sterling Lorence to document the scene only added to the mystery and drama. Their images showed moody ancient forests swirling with mist, with jagged rocks and tangled roots, all juxtaposed with precarious wooden features.
Breaking new ground
It was on these forested slopes where I’m standing today, just across the water from downtown Vancouver, that, hidden away from the Lycra-clad mainstream of ’90s mountain biking, pioneering trail builders like Digger began nailing planks of wood to logs and unwittingly gave birth to a whole new style of riding. One that’s pushed the boundaries of what’s possible on a bike, and has become known the world over as ‘North Shore’.
“I’d just walk out into the middle of the bush and start building,” Digger tells me, standing by the start to his most famous trail, ‘Ladies Only’. In dirt-sculpting terms, this man is the grand master – and this is his masterpiece. Although Todd’s building exploits date back to the late 1980s, when he dug Ladies in 1992, it was the first time anyone had even considered putting rock rolls, seesaws or log skinnies on a mountain bike trail.
The kilometre-long descent is full of world firsts, and even riding it today, 26 years on, it still feels one of a kind. And hard! With hollowedout tree trunks, curved bridges and pedal-catching roll-downs, we can’t imagine what it would have been like getting down it on an early ’90s hardtail. “First time I rode this, I remember being way in over my head,” laughs Gully, stopping to check out a kinked ladder bridge that Wade has just challenged him to manual across. For the North Van-born pro, these trails are where he cut his teeth and honed his craft.
As we stop to session the features, Digger looks on from the sidelines, smiling. Watching people enjoy his handiwork is what’s fuelled his desire to build. “I just loved thinking up something unique to build and then doing it,” he explains. “I’ve always tried to use natural features, so I’d see a rock and think, ‘Oh, this would be cool – you could ride over that and jump off there’. I’d build it, see it come to life and then see my friends having a good time riding it, and that just made me want to do more.”
The ladder bridges were born out of necessity, as a way to get over impassable ground. “Ghetto ramps”, Digger calls them. “I’d just grab some timber from the side of the trail and stick it over a hollow, and we’d ride it, like, ‘Woah,
builders began nailing planks of wood to logs and gave birth to a whole new style of riding
this is scary!’, even though we were only a foot off the ground!” From here, things soon escalated and elevated, as Digger, along with those inspired by him – Jerry Willows, Dan Cowan and others – started taking timber construction to new heights.
About this time, in the prairies of BC’s Interior, freeride was emerging as the wild demon child of mountain biking. The likes of Wade Simmons, Brett Tippie and Richie Schley were turning their backs on the race-focused culture of ’90s MTBing and looking to snowboarding for inspiration. They started bombing down gravel pits and dusty chutes around Kamloops and Rossland, carving turns and launching off drops. Their influence soon spread and North Vancouver’s trails just got gnarlier.
See what we saw
We’re staring up at a 6in-wide plank, suspended 12ft in the air on an elaborate construction of supports and cross braces. A seesaw balanced atop this leads into a leap of faith down to the forest floor below. This is one of the last remaining parts of the ‘Flying Circus’. A trail that took ‘Dangerous’ Dan Cowan two years to make and, when completed in 1998, was the craziest thing to have ever been constructed on the Shore. Scarily high, narrow, tricky to ride and with huge fall consequences, only an elite few ever cleaned it. Although most of the line now lies rotting in the undergrowth, it still stands as proof to the fearlessness of Dan and the other early Shore riders.
Thankfully for our wellbeing, the Circus is no longer ridable, so we follow Digger as he leads the way through a jumble of fallen trees to another of his creations – a massive mossy boulder with a chainring-catching crest before the take-off. “Have you hit this?” we enquire. “F**k no,” he laughs. “I just build ’em. This was the stupidest of the stupid!” Wade is unperturbed – he’s been doing stuff like this for well over two decades and, despite the half worn-away landing, he’s straight off it. The theme of being shown up by a 45-year-old dad continues as we venture further into the bush and emerge into a clearing, to be faced with a 10fttall wooden wallride. It’s green with algae and decidedly rickety, but that doesn’t stop Wade or Gully. The rotten slats snap where their back wheels impact the wall, so they just go higher each time to avoid the growing hole.
Hits and misses
Recording these sort of exploits on film has always been an intrinsic part of the North Shore scene. Digger started it, taping a camcorder to his helmet and chasing down his mates. “I ended up with hundreds of hours of Super 8 footage, which I put on tape, took down to Deep Cove bike shop and played on their TV,” he tells us. “Some guy came in and said, ‘Hey, that’s cool, can I buy one of those?’ and that’s what started the North Shore Extreme series.
As freeride filmmaking exploded, so did the level of stunts getting built on the Shore. One that stands out to us is Gully hitting the enormous ‘Toonie Drop’ on Mount Seymour. “I did it three times in one day and never again!” Luckily, he rode away to tell the tale. Wade shows us a hit where he wasn’t so lucky. Off the back of one of the switchbacks on Fromme, this ludicrous 50ft gap across a chasm is horribly off angle and has some awkwardly-positioned trees. He ended up crashing and breaking his leg, so the canyon was dubbed ‘The Femur Gap.’
One of the earliest films to be released was Kranked 1, in 1998, a movie that not only forged the careers of guys like Wade, but, along with images in the pages of BIKE Mag, shone a spotlight on the North Shore trails. The Vancouver authorities, who up until that point had turned a blind eye to all the building, suddenly felt the need to take action, as more and more riders flooded to the Shore and stunts got ever more dangerous.
One day in 1998, they cut down the woodwork on every Mount Cypress trail. As a result of this and a number of instances of trail sabotage, a group of riders banded together and formed the NSMBA (North Shore Mountain Bike Association). This advocacy group sought to legitimise the trails and was the beginning of the extensive network that the three Shore mountains are now home to.
this ludicrous 50ft gap across a chasm is horribly off angle and was dubbed the femur gap'
Between then and now, the Shore style has evolved considerably. Flow wasn’t something that came easily on the early trails, which were intended to challenge. They were filled with chutes into tight turns, tyre-width skinnies and drops to flat, which the bikes of the time struggled to cope with. Numerous snapped head tubes and sheared chainstays meant that more than a few bike companies started refusing warranty jobs from customers in BC.
“We dictated the bike design,” Digger tells us. “We built big drops, so they made big forks. We made skinnies through trees, so you had to cut your bars.” It’s amusing to look back now at the short, steep ‘huck bikes’ that developed from this, with their overbuilt frames, sky-high bottom brackets and Roach stem pads, but they were what every early ’00s freerider, me included, lusted after.
The more things change…
Along with this new type of bike came a shift in the way brands marketed them. No longer was it just race wins that won customers over, it was the death-defying stunts they saw in the videos. Rocky Mountain were the first brand to put together a team of pros paid just to ride, not race. With Simmons, Tippie and Schley getting onboard as the ‘Fro Riders’ (Cannondale had somehow managed to trademark the word freeride), a new riding discipline was born. The Shore went on to spawn other famous names, including Andrew Shandro and Thomas Vanderham.
Today, things are different. Technology has evolved, riding styles have changed and, with that, so have the type of trails we want to ride. The sphere of influence has come full circle and the mountains of Fromme, Cypress and Seymour, which once set the standard, are now being shaped by the bike park revolution. There are berms where there were once tight turns and the janky wood features have mostly been torn down. “The younger generation has a lot to do with it,” reckons Gully. “Why slow down to ride a feature over a creek when you can build a jump over it? I still love skinnies though,” he grins.
Modern enduro bikes definitely feel much better railing the sculpted berms of ‘Bobsleigh’ than they do endo-ing round on a ladder bridge, but the original classics like ‘7th Secret’, ‘Bookwus’, ‘Grannies’ and ‘Reaper’ are still there and well worth riding. Some things never change though, and Digger is still digging. He may be suffering with knee problems and not charging through the bushes clutching a camera like he used to, but head up Mount Fromme and he’ll probably be there, spade in hand, for the simple fact that he loves it and he loves mountain biking. If you see him, stop and say hi, because without him the North Shore trails – and trails worldwide – would look very different.