Scratching Your Itch
Mountain biking is one of the few sports where the participants can create their facility. In many places, they have to. At the beginning, trails were mostly existing routes created for some other purpose, like hiking, riding motos, or getting to and from trees that needed cutting. Today’s lucky punters can roll up to a trailhead and do their thing without a second thought: the sport is approaching its fourth decade and many places round the world have trail networks ready to go. They will find a ridiculously varied mix of trails handbuilt by volunteer working bees, scratched out by lone wolf enthusiasts, machine built by contractors, and almost unbuilt freeform things created by people riding down a line that...