05/12/2008

Dave Tolnai posing in his creations.

i ride here Dave Tolnai Riding Photo Margus Riga

I love the North Shore. Over the years, it’s given a lot to me. I still remember my first “North Shore” ride…

I was a young buck of 17 and I’d just made my way to the big city. I’d been riding for about 6 years or so and I really believed that there wasn’t much I couldn’t do on a bike. Late one September afternoon my friends suggested we head over to Mount Seymour for a ride. “What the hell” I thought. “Those mountains don’t look too far away.”

UBC isn’t exactly next door to Seymour. It took a couple of hours to get to the bottom of the mountain and a while longer to climb up the Old Buck to the then infamous Severed Dick. I had no idea what I was getting into.

We dropped in with our seats cranked up high, our bar ends proudly perched on our flat bars and our cantilever brakes ready to (barely) do their thing. It took, literally, 20 feet before I went over the handlebars for the first time of many. That ride kicked my ass. I hobbled back to UBC feeling absolutely defeated. I didn’t want to set foot on my bike for a while, but I knew that from that day forward, nothing would ever be the same. That day marked the beginning of my descent into this world I now know of bloated bikes, full-face helmets and flat pedals.

Soon we moved on to Fromme, discovering Seventh Secret, Grannies and Ladies Only. Bar-ends morphed into Riser Bars, cantilevers became V-brakes and big rings got left behind. Every weekend became about figuring out a way to get over to the North Shore for a ride. My confidence as a rider grew by leaps and bounds, and in turn so did my confidence as a human being. A good ride on the weekend led to a good week at school. The North Shore quickly shaped who I was, what I did and who I did it with. Not too many things in my life have done that.

So. Why the hell am I talking about this? Right now, we’re in relatively happy times on the North Shore. Cypress has just announced plans for lift-access riding and there are no huge conflicts on the horizon but we don’t have to look too far back to see huge amounts of conflict. Cypress has had stunts torn down by the Parks Board, Fromme has faced challenges with parking and with the North Vancouver City Council and Seymour has seen an exponential increase in traffic. It may not feel like it right now, but riding on the North Shore isn’t on the firmest ground. It’s my belief that we’re only one major incident away from losing any of these areas. And we will only have ourselves to blame.

As a group, we have to become more responsible for our actions. Every person who rides on the North Shore owes it to everybody else to do something. Anything. From working a trail maintenance day to staying off a closed trail or telling the jackass in the pick-up truck (or Subaru - Ed.) to turn down his Limp Bizkit and stop peeing on somebody’s lawn. If we don’t do something we’re going to lose everything. This may sound alarmist, but I think we need to sound the alarm. Every once in a while a serious event scares us into action. We need to work at protecting our trails even when closure doesn’t seem imminent.

With that in mind, I started thinking about what I could do. I came up with this T-shirt. I wanted to put something together that said “I ride a bike. I live in Vancouver. I ride the North Shore.” Hopefully you like it.

Dave Tolnai

Click here to buy a shirt and support the nsmba Mediums are now back in stock.