IMBA Bell Grant Competition 2013: VOTE MORC and Copper Harbor Trails Club!

Shandro voting with his wheels

This is not about good versus evil.  Or about us versus them.  Norwegian versus Swede or even 29er versus 26er.

This is about shrugging off a wet heavy stereotype.  Like pulling off a rain drenched cycling jacket after getting caught in an unexpected maelstrom 2 hours into a six hour ride.

I hear it all the time.  Mountain Biking in Minnesota???  Wow, what do you guys ride around in the cornfields??  UP?  Where is that?  The moon?  Must be flat too huh!?

My clubs work hard to do one major thing.  To improve the quality of the lives that they lead.

Its not about the next "big" trail or the cool amount of miles, its about quality.  Its about giving your kid a place to grow up where he or she can learn the simple pleasures of riding a bike off trail.

Its about clocking out from a 9-5 job, five days a week and pealing off those layers of stress and responsibilities and pulling up to the trailhead where your buddies are getting ready for a ride.  Then of course its about losing yourself on sweet single track, or Flow Trails nearly out your door and without passing a single person along the way.

While the rest of the mountain bike world wrings their hands about the amount of vertical, or the length of trail and run or the next mega ski area event, Midwestern Mountain bikers are living the off road dream and even re-defining it one trail at a time.

The Copper Harbor Trails Club system is a prime example of that.  Mind blowing.  Does not matter if your Andrew Shandro or  Joe Blow from Antigo.

MORC?  They make living in a CITY awesome.  It does not matter what part of the Twin Cities metro you live in, because of MORC you have a killer off road experience to ride on.

T-Bone railing Flying Squirrel

If there is one thing that I have learned in this job it is that as mountain bikers in the Upper Midwest region, we are all connected.  We have local riding and we have destination riding.  Each needs the other.
We need to grow better and more diverse riders where they dwell and we need to inspire them to leave the box and travel and to dream.  MORC needs Copper Harbor and visa versa.  If we can build a great bike park in the METRO then those riders will eventually want to travel to Copper Harbor to utilize the skills that they have learned.  So as a region, we need to support all of our big projects and when a chance like the Bell Grant comes, we need to get out in force and vote to bring home the bacon to our scene.

Ya der

The next several weeks we are going to be pumping the heck out of the Bell Competition and we are going to be pushing hard for Copper Harbor DH and for MORC and their Elm Creek Bike Park project.  In fact we are also going to be pushing hard for Brown County and their Flow Trail project as well.  We are all in this together and together with all of our votes, we are going to pound another nail in the coffin that is the midwest mountain bike stereotype........

Pass it on

Braappp!!