Ride: Mountain Biking in Bellingham and B.C.

There’s something about being outside and exploring new places, interacting with nature and finding your flow on the trails; something about mountain biking that Luke, head of engineering, can’t seem to get enough of.

“It’s the rush: the thrill of taking gravity and going downhill with speed and choosing new creative lines,” Luke said. “I can ride the same line in my backyard everyday and it’s going to be different every time. And if it’s not as thrilling as the last time, it’s really peaceful just being outside enjoying the forest and the mountains.”

On a recent trip to Squamish, British Columbia, Luke and his friend Riley explored steep, technical terrain and rode trails as old as the sport itself. Luke’s been riding for the last four years but just got up to Squamish for the first time recently. He said with a laugh that it isn’t going to take four years for him to get back.

In the last year, Luke’s put in time - hard time - on a backyard trail in Bellingham, Washington called Prison Love on Galbraith Mountain. The trail had been trashed by three years of logging and needed extensive rebuilding. For months, he went to Galbraith after work to ensure that the trail drained properly, to clear organic matter out of the way and ride with friends.

“Sometimes I’d go out there alone and work from 6 to 11pm, getting as much done as I could and figuring out how to do it as I saw best,” Luke said.

After a year of dedicated effort, he estimates that he and others put somewhere between 300 and 400 hours into the trail. The process actually began before Luke started at Trayvax, but once we caught wind of what he was up to, we decided to pitch in by adopting the trail with the help of the Whatcom Mountain Bike Coalition.

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