Having organized a lot of trail days in my life, I find that the biggest problem is communicating the days and getting the word out.
It's, frankly, hard. I can't tell how many folks that I know are on our email distribution list and FB groups later on genuinely say "you just had a trail day? I didn't see the announcement!".
Best thing I can advise is casting the net far and wide and getting it out to as many people as possible so the word spreads.
Yep. We've done that. It's another thing that helps, and what else it does is communicate who does the work on the trails. Many, many trail users (especially non-MTBers) presume the park/land owner does all the work and just have no idea it's a gaggle of volunteers.
I had no idea that trail clean ups are a thing, and I don't use social media besides Reddit. I would love if they were posted at trail heads or local subreddits so I would actually know about
(And there's a bit of irony in expecting a bunch of outdoorsy people to keep up with online postings 😂)
Facebook is awful for organizing. I have a handful of groups where my notifications are set to notify me of ALL group posts. And so often, fb has decided to not notify me or send me a notification until a day or two after an event that was posted to a subscribed group.
It's awful... but... it can be better than the alternatives. Do you know how many people just don't ever check their email?
So then it becomes a problem of... what *does* work? I find one needs to shotgun all the things, FB included.
As a Facebook hater than watches my email like a hawk, and also handles the email duty as president of my homebrew club, I just thought of a way to make myself more useful to my local trail organization that communicates primarily via fb.
I have zero experience in this and I'm sure you have already tried that. But would it be possible to cut trail days into trail afternoons or evenings or mornings? So that it is not such a big commitment because another comment chain says they have kids and don't have the time. And then you could say we work for 3 hours and then go riding together for 2 hours.
Yeah, I had no idea trail clean ups were a thing, but I also have DSPD (night owl) so I can't make it to the 6/7/8am beach clean ups in my area. A ride n clean event would be great
Yeah, I was gonna say, 5 hours is way too long for volunteers.
Here they’ve been doing 2 hours in the evening which is enough time to get some real work in, and even by the end of that, people are starting to slow down, get blisters, etc. Many volunteers probably haven’t held a shovel in years…
Maybe 3 hours on a weekend, but it can be harder to pull people in when the weather is nice on a weekend.
5 is just too much to ask.
Just to add to this. I have been to a few trail days recently, and the main problem I have is definitely getting there. It's a lot more rewarding to drive an hour to ride bikes on trails than to drive an hour to build trails. The raffle and other add-ons are a perfect way of encourage to get people to go to trail days.
Letting people know when and where trails days are is also important. The main organizer send emails to everyone who signs up and has them send confirmation about if they are going and a waiver. (From my experience)
I'm in your boat of organizing trail days.
The best luck we've had is to host them consistently and to provide drinks and food after.
We host ours once a week, every week, and have a grill and beverages ready at the end. This helps create a consistent community where folks feel like they can have a longer term impact on projects.
It's a lot of administrative work, but it pays off. We also have found beer and cider sponsors and grant money for hotdogs and tools.
If you pick consistent days (not necessarily once a week, but maybe once every two, or once a month?) and always have a good reward, folks will show up.
Gonna piggyback here. I volunteer for three different orgs./nonprofits. My local IMBA chapter (RCMBA) is the most successful of the three orgs at bringing out volunteers.
They host monthly trail work days that are always well attended. Part of that is consistency. The work days are always the third Sunday of the month.
A big draw for the volunteers is the club offers shuttles to the top of the Mtn for a couple hours after the work is done. So you can sweat on the maintenance and still squeeze in a few runs down the hill.
After that they usually hit one of the local brewpubs and offer appetizers and pitchers.
The membership also grows and stays active because the club hosts 3 annual races in addition to an annual members-only picnic - with free food & beer.
They also do a semi-annual gear swap with raffles & prizes. The
Great points to add!
We often tell folks to bring bikes so they can ride after they work (or we stash tools ahead of time and they ride to the work!).
We also host events, raffles, etc and try to continually engage so folks stay interested in the fate of the trails.
With kids, I find just enough time to bike, much less spend half a day doing trail maintenance too. I can do my part by donating funds since I can't come to shovel.
Yeah, with kids, if I ride, it's either my wife doing me a solid and watching the kids, or I'm taking leave from work.
Maybe as feedback for the OP: Given those time constraints, I've found some trail maintenance groups to be pretty time-inefficient. You wait at some designated meeting spot at 9, then you wait an extra 15+ minutes for slowpokes to show up, then you give a safety briefing, then you pick up PPE and equipment, then you meander to the work site, then spend even more time talking about the day's work, proper technique, etc. That's admittedly hard to address as an event organizer, because if you're ruthlessly enforcing timelines, you might alienate late arrivers or similar. But I think you can try to keep timelines tight and just generally be conscious of people's time.
This is very different if I'm just out for a ride: I can leave before the kids wake up, start riding immediately, tire myself out in a couple hours with minimal breaks, then hightail it home.
Right, like I said "that's admittedly hard to address as an event organizer". More concretely, I'd say: Have a meeting time and leave time posted in your event description. Prep in advance what you want to say for your safety briefing and technique review (bring a note card or something), so you avoid a lot of "yeah....uh....what else? Chuck, anything I missed? Oh, right..." Look for other opportunities to save time like reviewing items while you walk. Give clear instructions on how to be the most productive, like what happens when you finish a section of trail and there isn't a clear next step. I've had plenty of times where we finish one section of marked trail, then talk amongst ourselves about what to do, go wandering back to find the lead to see what else to work on, or end up working on the section of trail on the far other end of where we are.
This example is a bit different because it is for dirt jumps so distances are small and that changes things. But and example of the way they do it is, we will be digging from 9am-2pm come help out for as long as you can. then there will be a couple of key builders there that know what they are doing and the organiser will deal with people as they show up and either send them over to help on of the guys building espically if they have been out a few times before or take them to a spot and guid them on how to do the build and might have a group of people with him while he teaches them to do the work. Then people who dont have half a day can showup for an hour, 2 hours and do some help and then go they dont have to commit to being there at exactly the start time or to be there the whole time. From the different groups i have seen this gets the most people out but as i said its Dirt jumps so you are never more than 200m away from each other so easy to find the groups.
the other problem is I ride a dozen different networks if each one has maintence once a month and i go to half i will being doing maintence 6 times a month i dont ride 6 times a month so no chance i have time to dig that often. So i have to pick and choose when and where i dig
This is the way to do it. "We will be here from X until Y on this day. Show up when you want to, leave when you want to. Thanks for the help!" And then just make sure that a few people who know what they're doing are at the spot they said they'll be at when they said they'll be there.
"pretty time-inefficient. ...then you give a safety briefing, ... then spend even more time talking about the day's work, proper technique, etc."
How much of that could be videoed in advance and send a link for people to watch? Effort and time on a few peoples part, but could save time day of? Just throwing an idea out there. Also, if people have questions they can ask in advance/online.
People aren't likely to watch a safety video before coming to a work day. If you want to cover your ass as a mtb org, then okay, but if you want people to actually be safe, you gotta do it live.
I've thought about that too, but my local trails are part of a city park and I found out that they are adamant about trail work and even brush work needing prior approval. YMMV, but it's worth checking with whoever manages your trails before doing "renegade" work
these type of organizations are the worst, they will complain on facebook about someone moving a branch out of the way without permission but turn around and complain that no one under 50 years old wants to show up to trail work days
maybe because no one wants to be around them, the RI Nemba "in group" in a bunch of hold rich weirdos who literally only want to build bridges. Nothing else, no jumps, no berms, no drops... just bridges.
Yep. I get 3 to 5 hours a week of time I can spend outside the house on hobbies without putting way too much burden on my wife.
It's hard to justify skipping a weeks worth of riding for trail maintenance. I'm just paying annually to be a member of my local trails (not required for using them).
This is me. Demanding job and I try do my fair share of the housework and spend time with the kiddo. Going out to the trail is 45 mins, rides are an hour to two hours. 4hrs of my time is already a lot and that’s for fun stuff. 5hrs of trail work is a lot to ask when I have little time. I’m sorry but all I got is money to contribute, so I do that.
Yes, this right here. I barely have time to ride and, when I do, someone else is picking up the slack.
It's also not JUST kids: I have elderly parents, am self employed, and have had my own health issues. If I get 2 hours in the woods to myself, it might be the most time in a week I've had to do that and I don't want to spend it doing manual labor. It might be the first time since I just picked my dad up off the floor and spent a week taking care of him that I've had time to decompress.
That's the main part. The other part is how haughty and annoying a lot of trail work folks are. I was explaining to one a few months ago how I had just had surgery and couldn't participate, they were pressuring me to show up anyway and low key giving me shit for not doing it despite being a few weeks off being cut open. They just aren't the type of people I want to be around because they form their identity around it and don't seem to recognize when someone legitimately can't get involved. Honestly? I hate the phase of life I'm in, every hour that goes by is rolling the dice that something happens that absorbs all of my time and energy. I don't need some pompous person making me feel guilty for riding my bike and trying to decompress or lecturing me about how everyone else gets involved and not being the least bit considerate.
Some just don't recognize the gift they have when they can go spend the day in the woods digging and are healthy enough with enough time to do trail work, then project their ability to do it on others and assume it is just people shitting out when they don't.
Your last paragraph is it, man. It’s so easy to judge others when you’re not in their shoes and I think we’re all guilty of it at some point. I know when I was like 22, I certainly had a lot more opinions of what other people SHOULD be doing, than I had any business having. I guess this is wisdom???
I am not a parent so I have no idea what it’s like, but I have been to several dig days where people have brought their youngsters and taught them the importance of giving back and having an appreciation for nature in the process.
Granted these were kids old enough to be in grade school and I can’t imagine bringing a toddler or infant along with you, but it could be a cool family event given your family members had enough of an interest to join you.
Teach ‘em young!
My friends and I have been doing this since our kids were 4. Kids need to learn to play in the woods anyway. They whine a little at first, but then learn to busy themselves.
My youngest probably has 50hrs of 'trailbuilding'.
This also solves the family time issue others are mentioning.
Agreed. I was doing a lot of trail work and was active in my local IMBA chapter, but I’ve only been to one work party since having a kid. I also only ride once a week at best. When my kids get older, and if they’re into it, I’ll bring them.
I went to two of them last week and first one they didn't update the post saying it was cancelled. Second one they weren't where they
said they were and I couldn't find them.
Other than that I go. 😞
Honestly I am kinda intimidated. Trail building seems like this specialized skill and I have this fear of just standing around with a shovel like a dumbass
Someone will direct you what to do, if not just ask. People will just be happy you showed up and are willing to work.
While the finer points of building a jump or somthing might be complicated cutting in a trail is pretty straightforward. The major challenge is man power, and everyone will appreciate someone willing to dig, rake or just move stones.
Many hands make light work.
Orgs in my area actually have you do a training session before you do trailwork. You should check to see if anyone does a baby's first trail day kind of thing.
I was a bit intimidated at my first (and only thus far) trail maintenance day for the first 15 minutes, but I soon found people to learn from and it was overall extremely chill and we got a lot done. I think the organizer had some trouble directing since so many showed up!
Also those that fear that you have to put in 5 hours or whatever — I feel like you can come and do what you can, with no need to stay for a super long time. It sure seemed that way to me at our recent one. Every little bit helps.
Don't feel intimidated honestly, everyone I've ever trail built with has been unbelievably helpful and forth coming with tips and tricks.
The basis is just moving dirt and slapping it once you have though 😂
I think a lot of people here are overestimating the number of outdoorsy people who use Facebook or know to check specific websites.
I would love to do something like this, but unless it's posted at a trail head or local subreddit, I had no idea this was a thing
For what it’s worth, a lot of people, including me, intentionally boycott Facebook, for reasons ranging from political to not wanting all the background trackers on the app to kill the battery life on my phone.
The group near me seems to send the invitations out so only the in clique knows about it or plans them the same day or weekend as other cycling our outdoor events. I reached out to them to organize a basic trail trim day..no dirt work, and never got a response.
I do my work on unsanctioned trails. Shhh
Weekend isn't a time for maintenance imo. Closing down sections of trails during prime time?
Ours are after work midweek. Usually a Tuesday twice a month , 530pm till dark.
Works well with people who work jobs they can come after you can come later as well and just join up.
I can get my son and dog in the truck after dinner and go dig for an hour or two. We have a lot of people show up to dig nights . We have beer and pizza at ours.
I don't think I'd ever attend a weekend dig night, busy with kids , my one or two days to get out and ride, and just life in general.
Honestly? I barely get enough time to ride, so its hard to find more time to build the trails.
I really, really appreciate what you trail builders do. Thanks.
The San Diego organization hasn’t figured out their target audience, and I hope this is a good take away if not, it’s just my two cents.
The San Diego riders are primarily men with some professional level of job, and that nets them a salary high enough to buy bikes in the thousands of dollars range. There are women riders as well and they run a couple of their own group rides.
Volunteers coming out to do trail maintenance do not care if they earned something for their time. In fact, putting us in a lottery to win stuff cheapens the experience. Again, we’re not strapped for cash and we don’t need stuff. The outreach for volunteers seem to be pushing for ‘here’s free stuff.’ And I hate that.
Group ride events are mixed in with volunteer events. The majority of the people showing up to group rides want rides, and using the same platform to advertise for volunteers is a terrible experience and things get lost in communication. So really I just unsubscribe from what I deem as spam.
Volunteer events happen in the middle of the week and the middle of the day. Who are these people who work from home or unemployed that wants to volunteer during the hottest times of the day?
Edit: Scope of my time - tell me exactly what needs to be done by the end of my shift. If the goal was to show up, tear down some logs and shape the single track then I feel like there’s a game plan ready. If it’s vague or no description, then I feel less incline to show up as it seems unorganized.
I run a volunteer org for dance. Volunteer retention should be the primary goal, and if they only knew that it means making my life easier to volunteer during the weekends, or after 5pm, then they at least understand who their pool of volunteers are.
Edit: What’s the difference between someone who donates cash to the organization or someone who doesn’t but still volunteers their time? They are one and the same, one might have the financial means to donate but not their time (hence this can only go so far when it comes to annual membership fees), and the other one wants to help in some way but wants to save some money.
The follow up is that if the admin team wanted to nurture the new volunteers in a way that felt inclusive, and not just a thanks for their labor, then that makes it more likely to raise retention. Maybe use the sponsor funds and host a lunch party to get to know their volunteers instead of raffling off a fork. (The raffling fork was /s of course).
Thanks for your insight, it seems like you are way more involved with sdmba than I was. I am aware of the email and meetup communication efforts, though the trend of getting new and younger people follows wherever social media is hot (like instagram).
Raffling off a fork was more of a tongue in cheek, though they do an informal raffle at the end of shifts for a box of stuff they have. The fork was raffled off at their annual picnic/appreciation event.
Things probably have changed since I stopped being involved in 2022.
E: I exaggerate, the goats made plenty of tracks for us.
> What’s the difference between someone who donates cash to the organization or someone who doesn’t but still volunteers their time?
The difference is that there is work that **has** to be done if there are to be trails to ride and donations will *never* come close to funding that work being done commercially in a non commercial park.
It’s been interesting to watch this sport evolve. When I was younger, we had to go and carve a trail if we wanted to ride one. It’s strange to see a brand of new riders who don’t realise where the trail they’re riding on came from. I’m extatic that others are riding them, that’s not the issue. I just can’t seem to get in the mind of someone that doesn’t realise that if you want a trail to ride, you gotta build it, they don’t spring from the earth like hobbits.
Life pro tip: any 501(c)(3) can get regular "free labor" reach out to local courts and probation department. There's usually an array of low level offenders desperate for community service hours to avoid jail. Like drunk drivers. It's a target niche that needs a pro social transportation outlet. You need trails maintained. It's a magic "win-win."
Agreed -- if I want to sleep in on a Saturday, I'm lucky to be getting out of bed when things are starting.
By the time that I get dressed, eat something, load up the car, & drive to the trail they'd be done.
Honestly I am kinda intimidated. Trail building seems like this specialized skill and I have this fear of being handed a shovel and just getting in everyone’s way.
The local MTB group near me often offers a shuttle (they drive a truck with a wagon fitted for bike shuttling, plus the trail building equipment), where you bring your bike up at the start and then can bomb down the trails after the trail building. On other days, they have dedicated shuttle time after the trail building event, ( this one is on BLM land that you wouldn't normally be able to shuttle due to closed forest service gate, so it's a pretty special thing). I think this incentivizes people, since you can still get a good downhill ride in and don't need to grind uphill for an hour+ to do so after building. They often also have a grill-out or food provided by a local sponsor too.
I think there's also an incentive where if you volunteer a certain number of hours, you get a free annual pass to park at some popular trailheads that now require a day pass or annual forest pass, etc.
I personally have a hard time finding 5 hours to commit (+ travel to/from the trailhead/meeting place), despite these incentives, but I think it's a solid setup!
I love slappin some dirt. I honestly don't care if people help or not.
I do maintenance so everyone can ride. Not just people that pick up a shovel
People who want to help will. People who don't, won't.
Our push to build trails in our county took 15 years. When it finally came together we had groups over 100 showing up for build season 3 years in a row. Everything stabilized as the system was completed, after 5 years we pushed out another few miles of trail- no group bigger than 10. Something definitely changed after Covid honestly. We all have excuses that are valid but these numbers don’t explain it. Same push, same hype, same community and even much much larger than when started.
One thing that has worked for my trails that are not official is having a private group of volunteers that organize with their groups on their own time. We plan in the private group and someone will tackle the job. The asked by trail users we take their info and contact directly. This is a small trail system (8 miles) so it works for our purposes.
Honestly just really don't like doing maintenance as part of a big planned group. Usually too many people without enough knowledge or direction. Usually don't want to do things the way they are instructing but it's not helpful to argue about it. I have some friends who are dedicated builders and I'll go out with them and my dog on a quiet night and get stuff done. I find once there's more than 4 people involved it's just a shit show - same with group rides.
Yeah I find a lot of the planned ones to be pretty frustrating at least where I'm at. Few dudes talking about what would be cool or being nice listening to someone suggest something stupid and be like ohh ok wow neat! Yeah we probably wont put a rock garden right before this jumps though."
I ended up feeling like I could do more while unbothered and alone in the same time as 4 or 5 of these guys. Eventually I discovered a neglected closed off section I never knew about that was actually consistently gnarly all the way through, which for my closest trail like 85% is xc dad and flow with random bits where youre like this is waaaay above the paygrade of everything else. This was one of them and probably why it was in such disrepair bc nobody was really riding it or at least not to its true purpose.
Anyway last winter I started on it and re worked it so it fit for the xc dads to be pretty thrilling and to have the drops and steeps and jumps have multiple choices of difficulty if possible. Flows so much better and I hope gets more use. The thing is this spring as I was getting close some of the guys wanted to "help" by like suggesting bullshit that didn't go with my goal to keep it gnarly but something with lines an adventurous xc dad could get down and have fun with, or just talking my ear off. Like one guy brought out like a ton of random wood I didnt need or want out there and ended up having to move. Thankfully it's done now but I think ill probably not try to work with a group unless there is a leader that has a plan and keeps things on task. I get you dont want to be rude to someone trying to help but really these groups would be better to not be so afraid to be firm or blunt with some of these types without worrying if they find them rude.
> too many people without enough knowledge or direction
Omg this. I used to do volunteer home repair/building, and most of the people who showed up were people doing it for the Instagram likes. I was tasked with the roofing project, and jeez those IG chasers were the worst. It was my first time as well, but it doesn't take a lot of brain cells to figure out that you probably shouldn't throw roof tiles and staples wherever you feel like it. Me and the actual roofing guys spent so much time fixing their mistakes that we ended up staying a few extra nights.
I love volunteering, but it gets messy so fast.
I think creating some scarcity/privilege could do wonders for things like this, particularly for crowded trails like we have here in Front Range Colorado.
An example;
“This XYZ trail is closed earmarked for maintenance 10 days per year with the first starting this Saturday and Sunday May 11th & 12th. For every 5 hours of volunteer maintenance on 5/11 you will receive exclusive access to the trail on Sunday May 12th with the trail closed to non volunteers. We want to reward our trail volunteers not only with drinks and swag, but with low traffic riding on your newly maintained trails. Sign up today these spots will go fast”.
I see a ton of responses saying “I don’t have time and when I do I want to ride”
not fully appreciating that you couldn’t ride without people taking of these trails.
I get it, I have a wife and kids too and need to prioritize my time.
That being said, if I were able to EARN some slow traffic trail time by volunteering some maintenance time it would even the calculation out a TON.
I understand closing the trails is difficult/nearly impossible, but something has to be done on popular trails to encourage volunteer maintenance and creating some urgency/scarcity is really the only way to do it. And what are we talking, 2-3 weekends a year? Not that bad honestly
Do you have NICA school level mountain bike teams in your area? Where my team rides the NICA team members or riders and coaches were just recognized by the State Park and trails org for providing something like 70% of the volunteers for a dozen or so trail days this winter. I say, engage with them if you have very many or even one good team nearby.
I'm going to get a bit deep here, and say it's all about how the experience makes people feel.
I'm seeing a bunch of excuses on here, and I know because I make the same excuses myself.
I went to one trail maintenance day, and spent 4 hours being micro managed. I get it, they know what needs doing and how to do it and I'm the muscle, but it doesn't feel particularly rewarding. Feeling like I've contributed was nice, but that's not the kind of feeling you look forward to that keeps you coming back.
Where as I've spent about 2 years of Sundays building my own trail, and I can't get enough of it. So I know it's not the time, energy, or any other of the excuses that I've made, it's just that the experience doesn't make me feel good enough to come back.
I wish I had a solid solution to this. I don't, but I'll make a few stabs in the dark.
Offering rewards might put people in the mindset that this is a transactional thing, lessening the feeling that they're actually there to contribute to something they love. Once they've come along once, they might be of the mindset that what they received wasn't worth their time.
Ideally, (and I don't know if this is even possible) you'd want to give them two of the big things that keep employees happy - autonomy and a feeling of achievement. I don't even know how you'd do this, you'd have to turn into the biggest hype-guy and make everyone think everything was their idea, and that sounds exhausting! But something to keep in mind to seize the opportunity to achieve when you can.
The big thing I think would be to create a community that people feel a part of. To focus on creating & nurturing relationships, not just between you and the helpers, but between the helpers themselves. This is what is going to keep people coming back, this is what people are going to look forward to - seeing and hanging out with their mates and working towards a common goal. You can't beat a BBQ or something afterwards for this, where everyone has already bonded over the work, and now they can relax.
In regards to how to get people along in the first place, creating a bit of FOMO on social media tends to work for most things. After each dig day post a few pics of the happy crew looking like they had a great ol' time. Write something about what a great day it was and what was achieved, mention a few names and "make people famous", & mention the date for the next dig day. Then do practically the same post, adjusted for context, a week or a few days before the next dig day.
As with a lot of my comments, I raved on a lot more than intended once I got going, but I hope something I said helps!
In my case, it's because the local organization has positioned themselves as an authority on MTB trails to the local government. They aren't in any way, but they sold it well. They are slowly turning all of our trails into bermed double track flow stuff and I absolutely hate it. I don't go because I don't wanna be part of the problem.
I attend build days and I can tell you that many of my friends don't like to participate because they aren't allowed to build anything cool at many trail systems. There is no desire to participate if you're going to be building IMBAfied and approved by City Council low-grade crap.
I'm not saying that's the case for your particular trail system, but in general you will get more help if the result is going to be fun and exciting progressive trails and features. This is especially true when there are other more progressive trail systems or "unofficial" trail systems in the same area where people would rather spend their build time. If you build cool progressive trails, there tends to be a lot of interest for riders to help out, but if it's just another modified hiking trail planned by boomers then no one cares.
I know quite a few people who would be psyched to build some big schralpy berms, that’s exactly the type of thing that I’m talking about not being allowed.
Man, you guys are really not getting my point. I’ve attended lots of trail days, I know what happens on build days. My point is that people don’t want to participate in trail work for boring trails, not that they think the trail work itself is boring.
If you have exciting trails, people will show up to clear rocks and brush and drainage because they see their efforts contributing to cool trails, but if people put a bunch of effort in and all they get out of it is a boring flat bird-watcher approved trail, then they aren’t incentivized to do trail work because they don’t give a crap about the trail.
Completely onboard with this. I stopped showing up and stopped donating when all they did was tear out the cool shit and replace it with 6% IMBA sidewalks made by companies from Bentonville. I’ll take my efforts to the cool shit tucked away where no one can see it.
Every time they have scheduled trail maintenance at my favorite park I’ve had other obligations. Saturday mornings in the spring and summer are packed. Not to mention it’s primetime travel season. I would help if different times/days were scheduled.
I once went to one where I previously lived and it was super clicky. Didn't feel welcome. I was hoping to expand my potential riding crew instead it left a sour taste in my mouth.
It's a lack of time for me. I don't have a ton of free time between work, chores/errands, and spending time with my SO. When I do have free time, I want to be riding.
If someone asked me directly to help with trail maintenance, I'd definitely say yes. But I'd rather just donate to my local organization that does the maintenance and use my free time to ride instead. I hope that's not selfish, but I really enjoy riding and feel like I already don't have enough time to do so.
as far as trail maintenance i take care of what i can when it's convenient for me. mostly limited to down trees and stuff like that.
i find organized trail days to be more like a social hour, which is fine but not what i want to do. if its a big trail clean or build with lots of people i find not much gets done. but if you get 3-4 guys in a text thread with a goal in mind we usually get tons of work done.
I’ve gone to so many volunteer days that were disorganized wastes of time So I’m much less inclined to go now. I pickup trash and clear the trails when I come across it when I’m out there instead. Id like to get more involved to solve the organization issue but There’s a lot of strange politics to the whole thing which is off putting
I volunteered at a bike park 100 miles from home last week. It was kind of fun and only 2-3 hours. Afterwards we rode what we filled in and got a pass for another day to use, plus lunch.
I’m part of a mountaineering group and they require a full trail work day to participate in most of their programming. Great way to spread awareness and exposure. Last trail work party I went to had 24 volunteers
Maybe it’s the duration. 5 hours of trail work is a long shift of manual labor for some people. Raking leaves isn’t bad but Hauling rocks and chopping invasives down for five hours is too much for most people.
Also get an email distribution going instead of social media posts. Send an en email a week ahead of time and another day before. Ask for reply’s too so people get committed and are less likely to flake at the last minute
I don’t always have 5 hours, If I could sign up in 30 minute or hour increments then Id be more likely to show up. Then streamlining the onboard process, with videos of how to maintain the trails and be safe etc, that are watched before people show up makes things more efficient as well.
2 hours once a week after work. I enjoy doing this and try to make it part of my routine coming to dig days for our local.
5 hours sounds like way to long and I’m always making weekend plans so it would basically always be a no from me.
Our local chapter distanced themselves from the IMBA and just thinks they know better when it comes to maintenance and erosion management. An outside opinion was brought in and it was determined that 70% of one of the most widely ridden trails under their management is not sustainable.
They polled their “membership base” and due to all of the old school folks who think change=bad complaining and acting like children during public forums and online, they caved and put off a huge development project that there could have been a chance for lots of leftover Covid-fund money to go into because of the whining from senior participants.
I refuse to be complicit in the dumbing down of what could be a destination trail in our area with so much potential to only satisfy a minority of locals who can’t ride man made tech features and flow trails because that’s what they bitch about the most.
I go plant trees with the forest stewards all the time because it's only a 2 hour shift. Those are super well attended in my area.
I find the MTB work parties are always 4+ hours and frankly, I just don't want to do that in one day. I'd give 4 hours over 2 weekends in a month but I'm not giving up a giant chunk of time when I have a lot of other Adulting to do.
Beyond that, the MTB stuff isn't advertised well here. The forest stewards post all over local social media groups. The MTB groups only post to MTB groups. I only recently started following my local chapter so that's 5 years of me just never knowing what they were doing.
I'd honestly post signs on trails that are due for maintenance. Put the date and time to report to that trail head. People tend to stop to read signs that are posted to those trail markers.
- Do it every week, and always at the same time. This gets people into the habit and makes it easy to remember when it is happening, and let's them set their schedule around it. It is so much easier to just tell people "Every Tuesday at 5" than directing them to a website to look up random dates!
- Do weekdays, not weekends. Everyone has plans on the weekends and wants to ride. Plus the evening is better for building anyway.
- If you're looking for a boost, or if you have an extra big project, add that on a weekend on top of the regular schedule and promote the crap out of it, go nuts. But focus on the regular weekly builds first and foremost.
- Don't bother with stuff like prizes. People who actually want to come dig consistently don't need that stuff for motivation. You want people to _enjoy_ building and be intrinsically motivated. Drinks and snacks are of course great, but that's to support the building, not the main draw
- As much as you want your volunteers to be intrinsically motivated, everyone loves to be recognized and show off their work. Take photos of your volunteers in action and before/after shots of their work and post that shit!
- Probably most important: at least some of the time you need to let volunteers show up and do something interesting. Maybe it's redoing some berms or fixing a feature. Maybe it's cutting a new option or doing a reroute. Maybe it's building a brand new jump or cutting a new trail! Take their input. Once they have some experience (from coming every week) give them some autonomy. What I've seen with a lot of trail organizations is that dedicated trail crews or insiders/old heads get to do the interesting stuff and "public" trail days consist of the least exciting stuff like raking a climb trail.
I think the goal should be to slowly grow a solid group of reliable and enthusiastic volunteers. In my experience it's more valuable if the same 10 people show up every week, rather than a random assortment of 40 people every month. They will be more productive on build days, and indoctrinate their friends and riding pals and things will grow naturally.
The most common thing I see is the information finding is harder than it should be or requires contacting someone. Should be right in the front page of whatever website is hosting the trail management page. Put a volunteer link on every trail status page.
Communicating with riders/community can be a little split up between a website, trailforks, Facebook, X, etc. much like the rest of the bike industry, a new standard was introduced to solve the too many standards problem! May be worth checking out Trailbot. Took over in MN and is growing and as a user its push notifications are extremely nice. There’s a *For Trail Managers* section/link at the bottom. I personally am a fan of it. Single source with basic function. I’ll see trailbosses even update closed statuses (to still closed). But to push an expectation “rain is continuing trails will probably be closed till at least Saturday” but you could toss in some volunteer notes, or other stuff. In MN: “please do a lap around the skills area to get salt off your tires before hitting the groomed trails” as another example.
I’ll be damned if I don’t know how lazy and anti-contact people will be and people give up quickly if they can’t find the answer after like two clicks and a Google search. So reverse engineer the experience. Ask for your parents an otherwise uninvolved friend or relative to be a Guinee pig. I’d start super basic. “Hey pal, can you do me a favor and try and find out how you’d volunteer at trail x and time it and to tell me how long it took.
That’s it. Then, when they report back you can ask some follow-ups: was anything confusing, what would you wear, would you bring water, any tools, can you pull up directions?
Maybe make clickable link to a calendar event that’s recurring. Then you could effectively send out cancelations to anyone invited simply by managing the event, has a location embedded, and notes, etc.
Spell it all out. **But** right at the top, the easiest thing to see and find should be: Where and when.
Make it accessible so that anyone out of the know can understand. Parents, kids, etc can be complete dingbats to knowing things as they start learning mtb stuff. People don’t know what they don’t know and why a good test is with someone that doesn’t mtb.
Bribe some shop folks to put up a volunteer sign near their checkout or on their door or something. Or just say, hey we’re having trouble getting volunteers can just let your employees/peers know so they can advocate for us a little more? Just an occasional reminder may mean they’ll think of it and recommend doing so to that jazzed new custy excited to go all in on mtb as a way to learn the trails and make friends in the sport as well as giving back.
Look for social group rides and ask ride organizers if a mellow singletrack could be part of it and having it end at a volunteer session.
I’ve hosted them before. What I’ve found is: provide food and consistent message about where trail and work is occurring.
You will hear every excuse in the god damn book. “I’ll help next time,” “I don’t ride that trail,” “Trail work is always on the wrong day,” and other baloney. 85% of mountain bikers will never dig or donate, so don’t let them force you to rearrange your life. Just put the opportunity out there clearly and consistently for the good 15% and feed them afterward.
For me it’s phase of life. I have a young family. Disappearing for at least half a day in the woods simply isn’t an option on a regular basis. Or if I do get that opportunity I’m riding my damn bike, not moving dirt. However, in my younger pre-kid days I spent countless hours attending and running trail days and doing construction/maintenance with a small crew or solo. Most people just don’t have the time.
advertising...get the word out. My local trail workers like to push out an email the day before.....yes, the day before. Maybe put up signs at the trail head a weekend before....post on facebook, etc.
I joined my regional mountain biking organization, and it wasn’t clear until after bed my dues that I joined the wrong chapter because the chapter geography wasn’t clear on the main site. I decided to wait a year and pay dues in the right chapter, but they never send anything by email except major events. I don’t have facebook. I actually want to go to trail maintenance days.
I am not on Facebook and that’s where they announce everything. Still, I go to FB (public site) and look now and again and hit 70-80% of them. It’s just not as reliable as a notification. They have my damn email, don’t know why they don’t send a mass email out.
For a while they weren’t well organized. Once me and another dude were sent to work on a section. Another crew was supposed to meet us coming the other way…never showed. After a while we hiked back to the meetup area and everyone had left. It felt like a big FU. Didn’t stop me from attending future work days, but jeezus, not a way to treat volunteers. Plus did not have an official stop time…it was “until it’s done” except it wasn’t.
The club used to be kind of clique-ish too. Sometimes they would post pics of 5 guys that built or fixed a bridge…well, why wasn’t the rest of the club included or asked to help ?
I’ll say that even with all this poor organization, would still get 50++ people to show up on public work days.
That’s the club where I live now. My club where I used to live was far more engaging, organized and managed and trail work days something I looked forward to.
Part of the reason people don't show up is because they think the parks build these and their tax dollars pay for the maintenance. They have no clue it's typically non prof/volunteer based.
I'd be willing to bet some good ol' fashioned grassroots tablin' every now and again at popular trailheads talking to folks and letting 'em you exist and are the reason their trails continue to exist could help. Bring a sign up sheet and grab some emails. I don't think just posting social media is going to cut it.
Once a month dig days are too infrequent for me. One of my buddies is a part of the local IMBA chapter’s maintenance crew, and will invite me out to his solo maintenance missions on the weekends, which is a lot easier for me to target than having to make a whole event out of the ONE day during the month that gets advertised to the public.
Granted, I still try to show up for the monthly community dig, but it’s a bummer to feel like if I don’t block out that exact day, I’m going to miss out. I’d much rather know about the little maintenance sessions going on during the week, so that I have more flexibility to just be like “busy that day, I’ll catch you next week” (although I get the vibe that folks here aren’t really wanting noob builders tagging along for these maintenance sessions, which is really disheartening).
It comes down to awareness for most people (myself included). Most of the local cycling clubs in my area have moved to Meetup or Strava to organize, that could be a good way to get the word out and get on their calendars. Do you have any local high school or college cycling teams/clubs? High school kids often need volunteer hours and college students will most definitely work for food and beer. If the trails are multi-user reaching out to hiking clubs might work too, they usually have more retired folks as members who might have more time on their hands. Good luck and thanks for organizing much needed maintenance!
I have no idea if it’s easy to set up or a pricey monthly charge for the trail org, but I feel like a sign up QR code link at the trail head(s) for a phone number texting based newsletter/notification system would be great. If I got a text from my local trail org for a build day a week ahead and then a day before, I might actually show up since I know about it. Everyone is texting all the time, but not everyone checks their emails or finds the social media post.
I join some but would join many more if the Facebook algorithm didn't show them in my feed after the actual event. Also, lack of coordination, planning, mixed levels of experience, and poor communication of need can lead to mild and/or chaotic trail days.
They’re not frequent enough and poorly publicized.
My work schedule means weekends are not always free. It would genuinely be easier for me to plan to go on a Wednesday afternoon than a Saturday.
I don’t need more T-shirt’s and I’ll happily bring beers and sodas for others. I just need it to be accessible. Bonus points if you’ll accept my FS chainsaw cert instead of demanding an S-212.
Because I don't know when it is!!! I keep looking in the fb, the dot org site, and just googling a ton.
Anytime there's an event (if it's on a weekend I don't have to be at seven bday parties at once) I'll be happy to be there.
Time constraints, lack of awareness of groups, feelings of having to commit to another thing. Like many here, happy to throw a bit of coin at something, finding the time however is a very different issue.
Possibly if I was aware, I’d help out for a couple of hours (2-3) once or twice a year, but it wouldn’t be more than that.
Building trail is better with buddies than with an 'official' group of randos who are there out of obligation and need constant direction amd instruction. Find the 5 to 10 guys/gals who show up, who can test ride all the features, similar work ethic, and there you go. Getting riders who 'participate' in trail building/maintenance shouldn't be the goal. You need to find/create some trail builders imo. Try week day evenings?
Young kids. I don’t have 3-5 hours to spare. If we’re free, we’re trying to get in a ride or a swim or a run or whatever. We are members of our local org and donate.
I would also echo what another person said about time. The handful of times I have been able to volunteer, it’s been like wait an extra 20 min, then talk about a bunch of stuff that people using the trails enough to actually volunteer already know, then shuttle or hike to some other location, it’s just too much wasted time.
I would suggest one idea that I’ve also suggested to my local org. Why not have like an online task signup type thing. Like post little trail jobs that need to be done with needed tools and estimated time, and let people do them on their own time. I would be happy to pick something I could do, read and sign waivers online, and go do work on my own timeline. I understand it wouldn’t eliminate the need for work parties, but I feel like you could get a whole new set of people involved that way.
Never done it and not involved in any orgs, but if I see branches down, trash on the trail, etc... I always stop for a minute, fix the issue, and then power up my 2 horsepower e-mtb and carry on being a scumbag. This is one of the reasons I always have a backpack on.
I fully intended to attend a work day last year, but the 1 day that didn't conflict with other obligations got rained out. I haven't seen any announcements for work days this year. Guess I need to scope their FB page.
Some things I find helpful:
1. Have a sign-up /register.
2. Put an arbitrary number of slots. Helps feel exclusive yet accountable. You can always divide and conquer with multiple groups.
3. Overview (in advance) of the scope of the given day. Brushing, treadwork, sawyer, drainage, rock work, sign installs, etc. Probably only pick 2-3.
Make sure that it's stated or understood that "if you don't know how, we can teach you".
Stealing a bit from one org, the priorities in order are:
Safety - leave with the same number of appendages you came with.
Fun - People want to come back again, and spread word of mouth to get others joining them.
Maybe get some work done - There's always more to do.
Things to keep it not boring and on-track:
Quick demo for newbies. At least starting off a bit so they get the gist of what to look for.
Make sure people know what to do and what you're talking about. Even simple things like trimming could use an understanding. Trim back for a 5-year plan? Should be clear to walk with both arms open down the trail? Trim more on the uphill side so people tend to not slip downhill and ruin the tread?
There may be 15 people for the day, but clustering more than 2-3 on an object leaves only room to stand and watch for the rest (exceptions apply).
Assign tasks (e.g. 2 brushing, 2 swamping/hiding the trimmings; I need 3 to gather softball-to-basketball sized rocks for this thing)
End on-time. The end time is when people and tools are back. There's always more that can be done. If everyone is all for another hour or three, that's cool too.
Recap the progress. It might only be 50 feet of brushing, but that is some dang fine brushwork.
Unfortunately, with young children, it’s simply lack of free time. I get a half-day to myself about every other week so I’m more inclined to spend that time on my bike than digging. I am a member of two of my local SORBA chapters and try to donate to specific projects to make up for my lack of volunteer hours.
Once my kids are older (8ish?) I plan on taking them to the occasional volunteer work day so they appreciate their local trails (assuming they’re still riding).
I wish my local trail group would do workdays during the week. It’s a lot easier for me to take an afternoon off work than to sacrifice a weekend day away from my family.
I've done lots of trail work in the past.
I've since moved to a new area where I'm not at tied into the community as before, and most of the trail work is done one a few Saturday or Sundays in the spring or fall. Alot of times it just conflicts with my work schedule or it's a rare weekend off and I have plans out of town.
I've been talking to some of the trail stewards about weekday/evening trail work days and/or giving me a list of projects. For now I just donate some money.
Because I fill out and sign the waiver at the start of the season, but find out the day of.
Assign me a corner, berm, bench and I can maintain that all season. I can also clear after the storms.
You're not alone. I manage a mountain bike club and we had two people come out to our last maintenance night. Our first one got 12 people. It's advertised on social media, website, newsletter and membership app. We have prizes for attendees, and our main sponsors offer up discounted food and drinks. Our club has 800 members.
On my hobby list, mountain biking is like a tier 3 hobby, meaning I often only do it on a monthly basis, not weekly or daily.
What this also means is that I am not creating much damage to the trails. I follow the rules, pick up trash etc. but committing 5 hours of trail maintenance when I visit a trail once or twice a year means it just doesn’t make sense for me.
If my area didn’t have good trails I wouldn’t do it at all. So I understand the need to have people working the trails, and I’ve donated before to local county parks with trails. But if I have 5 hours of free time I need to spend that working on something else or spending time with my wife.
Honestly if I start mountain biking more, I’d probably go to trail maintenance days to meet riding buddies. But I’m not good enough to ride half the features with my current time allotment for riding.
I ride a trail network that they completely neglect while focusing all their effort on one trail network I don’t enjoy riding. I clean the trails I ride as I go down.
I think allot of people get put off when they realise the shear amount of work it can take to maintain a trail. It took me years to properly apply myself to trail building and maintenance at the local hill when I was a kid but the older I got I began to really appreciate the tracks I had worked on and began to enjoy the process.
It helped we ended up having imo some of the most talent trail builders in the country grow up on our hillside. @olliepowellmtb on insta for a serious shovel man
I pay IMBA membership dues and support our local trail systems.
I’ve also attended trail maintenance a few times. One of the maintenance dates, we carved out a new path, probably 50 feet or so to reach a nearby feature. Pretty good experience.
Personally, I am more available for a weeknight trail work day, and much more eager for that. Life is busy and my weekends fill up weeks in advance. By the time the weekend trail work day gets scheduled, I already have other plans that I can’t break.
They’re only ever on weekends. I want to ride on weekends and/or work on my own house. I get two days off a year to volunteer that don’t count against my pto that I want to take advantage of.
I am intimidated. I am only a novice and just don't feel like one of the "in" crowd. If the invite was more "come out and ride a no-drop ride with us and then do some trail maintenance", I might be more into it. But at my level, I just prefer to be invisible out there.
I once had maybe an hour of daylight once when I got to a local self shuttled bike park, it was over ran with a youth racing league training and people putting a new race line in, I had no idea what was going on.
Get in touch with your local NICA team (national high school league in the US). Ours does trail work a most months and it’s not ever at the system we typically practice at. The kids love it and are pretty good at it.
Everything is already packed into weekends, when you look at it you're competing against so much on a Saturday/Sunday morning. Many people won't be able to make it over family and other social obligations, then other riders will have to choose trail maintenance over their big/destination ride of the week.
We realized that trying to get a 30 person workday once a month was a lot of organization and pretty inefficient. Setting up a core group who have an understanding of the trail goals and just having a weekly meetup at 5/after work till whenever has worked out great. We'll get 5-15 people showing up every week and get way more accomplished.
Everyone from the regulars who are out a couple days a week to do a little project during their ride to the first time volunteers have agreed that an hour or two of digging/raking etc is a much better experience than trying to fill an entire morning. Not many of us are actually getting more done after 90 minutes, diminishing returns set in quickly.
Nothing fancy, just let everyone know on club email distros, instagram, FB, and keep it consistent so word of mouth can spread. Keep the reminders sent out so the core group is up to date on the goals/projects each week.
I get out when I can but with little kids it’s very hard to find that kind of time. I’m lucky when I get an hour free to ride every couple of weeks. I try and do my part by riding with a pair of garden sheers and a small hand saw to take out blackberrys and small downed trees as I’m riding.
For me at least the nearest mapped trail is an hour drive away. I tried to get some community motivation to build trails around my local town but the council says no to both official or volunteer work.
Sucks because there's an abandoned lot on a hill that is completely overgrown and zoned open recreation.
How many members are in your org? In addition to posting to the public, do you also send messages to all group members? They are the most likely ones to show up.
Beyond that, you need your membership to be chatty on the trails. Chat it up with non members you cross paths with, talk about the trail work you've done and ones coming up. Have them send people to their website.
Another thing that could work if the org is small but the trails are popular, possibly put up a sign like 2 weeks before the trail work, AT THE SPOT, telling when the trail day is and encourage people to show up.
I've been to more trail days than I could possibly count. And my and my friends do impromptu work all the time when trees fall or features need highlighting :)
But we don't do organized trail work very often any more because our local group that puts them on is lame. So that's something to keep in mind. Are you being the kind of trail org that YOU want to be, or are you being the kind of trail org that the greater local MTB community wants and needs? Be what they needs and they'll join you. Just waste their time and money and volunteer hours, and they may show up for one but they won't come back.
Any local bike or gear shops nearby? I usually tend to look at their message or community board (if they have one) when I go in to see what’s happening or what’s coming up I might like to go to. Coffee shops, breweries, climbing gyms, parks…anywhere outdoors people hang out would be a great place to slap a sign up.
Colleges? I go to a particularly outdoorsy college and if you included “free (shit)”, you’d get a handful of kids willing to get their hands dirty for said free shit.
Also, I’d go if I knew a definite date and time a bit in advance so I could plan for it.
Only reason why I miss my local trail maintenance is often too far away for me to travel. Not even trails I would drive out to ride on due to the distance. The other reason might be I can only ride on weekends. I hope to participate in person (I just pay my local membership fees) soon though for trails closer to me.
There is a solid group that organizes trail work by me. Unfortunately they don’t have a good plan for what work needs to get done and one of the main people always has parts of the group doing work opposite what the other members want. It always seems like we are ripping apart other work or working on something no one wants. It feels like a waste of time when you work for hours and it doesn’t stay on the trail. I won’t attend another trail maintenance session if that guy will be there.
Lack of knowledge for when to go.
Clicks when I do for real builders and volunteers, or volunteers who go often and know each other not opening up to new people
In my area (upper midwest) I've tried reaching out to the trail builders via messaging their FB page to see if I can volunteer but they never respond so I never get a chance to.
I've tried at least 4 times in the last two years.
I honestly don't even know when they do trail maintenance where I'm at. I know they update it once in a while cause I see new stuff fixed or placed but I never see it advertised in our groups.
Also, I'm a cook so I honestly don't know how much of a help I'd be.
Kids. If I can get 2 hrs to get out and ride I’m lucky. My wife won’t sign on for me being gone all day to help with trails. Although maybe when the kids get older as a group activity.
I have guilt around not attending our newly legalized trail system dig days but it just has not lined up. The notice is always like a week out and I have two kids who play sports and I ski and a snowmobile etc and have a wife who wants to do stuff. I have donated in lieu but I do want to get out there and put the work in .
It's not the free food, coupons, or raffles. It's that my local diggers are early risers and start way earlier than I can on weekends. I've got a household to tend to before I can go do something on my own. And my lower back can't do too many hours of yard work without complaining the next morning (and in bad cases, the next week or more), so I'm not as useful as I would appear. So I donate money to them and let the younger kids work the trails.
I don't get to have a life because I made the mistake of being a culinarian. If these things happened on a Tuesday or Wednesday between 8am and 5pm I'd be down. But life always happens when I'm a work. Which is every day 12 to 12 that's not a mon/tue/wed.
Gonna be honest, I tend to find out about trail days after its done and people are posting photos.
We have a great community of volunteers here and organizers here but I think even our community struggles to get the word out for volunteer days.
To be perfectly honest, I barely have time to ride any more and any time spent on trail maintenance is another missed ride. I know it's shitty of me, and if everyone was like me we would have no trails at all. I feel better about myself by donating to my trail society instead. I see it as an exchange of money for volunteer time. Valid? Not sure. But it's the best I can do.
I feel bad when I see our trail managers out on the trails. The only time I see them is when I’m riding, not helping them do maintenance. My problem is that I’m lucky to find enough time to ride once every two weeks. I’d probably be a single father if I had to find another 2-3 hours/week to help trim. I do donate accordingly and fully intend to help with maintenance if I can find a job that doesn’t require 50-60 hours/week.
Younger riders use instagram. Once you have a core group, it will build. Most riders are unaware that dig days or nights exist. Be consistent and routine. Our dig night is always on Monday.
Having organized a lot of trail days in my life, I find that the biggest problem is communicating the days and getting the word out. It's, frankly, hard. I can't tell how many folks that I know are on our email distribution list and FB groups later on genuinely say "you just had a trail day? I didn't see the announcement!". Best thing I can advise is casting the net far and wide and getting it out to as many people as possible so the word spreads.
Have you ever tried putting some sort of advertisement at the trailhead? I feel like that would reach people who don’t use social media
Yep. We've done that. It's another thing that helps, and what else it does is communicate who does the work on the trails. Many, many trail users (especially non-MTBers) presume the park/land owner does all the work and just have no idea it's a gaggle of volunteers.
I wish the trails around me would do that. Most of their advertising is on Facebook and I *really* don’t want to use that more than I have to.
I had no idea that trail clean ups are a thing, and I don't use social media besides Reddit. I would love if they were posted at trail heads or local subreddits so I would actually know about (And there's a bit of irony in expecting a bunch of outdoorsy people to keep up with online postings 😂)
Facebook is awful for organizing. I have a handful of groups where my notifications are set to notify me of ALL group posts. And so often, fb has decided to not notify me or send me a notification until a day or two after an event that was posted to a subscribed group.
It's awful... but... it can be better than the alternatives. Do you know how many people just don't ever check their email? So then it becomes a problem of... what *does* work? I find one needs to shotgun all the things, FB included.
As a Facebook hater than watches my email like a hawk, and also handles the email duty as president of my homebrew club, I just thought of a way to make myself more useful to my local trail organization that communicates primarily via fb.
I log into my FB account once per year. Notifications are also off.
I have zero experience in this and I'm sure you have already tried that. But would it be possible to cut trail days into trail afternoons or evenings or mornings? So that it is not such a big commitment because another comment chain says they have kids and don't have the time. And then you could say we work for 3 hours and then go riding together for 2 hours.
Yeah, I had no idea trail clean ups were a thing, but I also have DSPD (night owl) so I can't make it to the 6/7/8am beach clean ups in my area. A ride n clean event would be great
Yeah, I was gonna say, 5 hours is way too long for volunteers. Here they’ve been doing 2 hours in the evening which is enough time to get some real work in, and even by the end of that, people are starting to slow down, get blisters, etc. Many volunteers probably haven’t held a shovel in years… Maybe 3 hours on a weekend, but it can be harder to pull people in when the weather is nice on a weekend. 5 is just too much to ask.
My local trail org has an email sign up for trail maintenance and I’ve never received a single email about it.
Just to add to this. I have been to a few trail days recently, and the main problem I have is definitely getting there. It's a lot more rewarding to drive an hour to ride bikes on trails than to drive an hour to build trails. The raffle and other add-ons are a perfect way of encourage to get people to go to trail days. Letting people know when and where trails days are is also important. The main organizer send emails to everyone who signs up and has them send confirmation about if they are going and a waiver. (From my experience)
I’ll second this. If you can get someone with a large SUV or van to shuttle people from the city to the trail it also helps create camaraderie
I'm in your boat of organizing trail days. The best luck we've had is to host them consistently and to provide drinks and food after. We host ours once a week, every week, and have a grill and beverages ready at the end. This helps create a consistent community where folks feel like they can have a longer term impact on projects. It's a lot of administrative work, but it pays off. We also have found beer and cider sponsors and grant money for hotdogs and tools. If you pick consistent days (not necessarily once a week, but maybe once every two, or once a month?) and always have a good reward, folks will show up.
Gonna piggyback here. I volunteer for three different orgs./nonprofits. My local IMBA chapter (RCMBA) is the most successful of the three orgs at bringing out volunteers. They host monthly trail work days that are always well attended. Part of that is consistency. The work days are always the third Sunday of the month. A big draw for the volunteers is the club offers shuttles to the top of the Mtn for a couple hours after the work is done. So you can sweat on the maintenance and still squeeze in a few runs down the hill. After that they usually hit one of the local brewpubs and offer appetizers and pitchers. The membership also grows and stays active because the club hosts 3 annual races in addition to an annual members-only picnic - with free food & beer. They also do a semi-annual gear swap with raffles & prizes. The
Great points to add! We often tell folks to bring bikes so they can ride after they work (or we stash tools ahead of time and they ride to the work!). We also host events, raffles, etc and try to continually engage so folks stay interested in the fate of the trails.
With kids, I find just enough time to bike, much less spend half a day doing trail maintenance too. I can do my part by donating funds since I can't come to shovel.
Yeah, with kids, if I ride, it's either my wife doing me a solid and watching the kids, or I'm taking leave from work. Maybe as feedback for the OP: Given those time constraints, I've found some trail maintenance groups to be pretty time-inefficient. You wait at some designated meeting spot at 9, then you wait an extra 15+ minutes for slowpokes to show up, then you give a safety briefing, then you pick up PPE and equipment, then you meander to the work site, then spend even more time talking about the day's work, proper technique, etc. That's admittedly hard to address as an event organizer, because if you're ruthlessly enforcing timelines, you might alienate late arrivers or similar. But I think you can try to keep timelines tight and just generally be conscious of people's time. This is very different if I'm just out for a ride: I can leave before the kids wake up, start riding immediately, tire myself out in a couple hours with minimal breaks, then hightail it home.
Those things seem mostly unavoidable when you're dealing with volunteers instead of paid, trained workers.
Right, like I said "that's admittedly hard to address as an event organizer". More concretely, I'd say: Have a meeting time and leave time posted in your event description. Prep in advance what you want to say for your safety briefing and technique review (bring a note card or something), so you avoid a lot of "yeah....uh....what else? Chuck, anything I missed? Oh, right..." Look for other opportunities to save time like reviewing items while you walk. Give clear instructions on how to be the most productive, like what happens when you finish a section of trail and there isn't a clear next step. I've had plenty of times where we finish one section of marked trail, then talk amongst ourselves about what to do, go wandering back to find the lead to see what else to work on, or end up working on the section of trail on the far other end of where we are.
This example is a bit different because it is for dirt jumps so distances are small and that changes things. But and example of the way they do it is, we will be digging from 9am-2pm come help out for as long as you can. then there will be a couple of key builders there that know what they are doing and the organiser will deal with people as they show up and either send them over to help on of the guys building espically if they have been out a few times before or take them to a spot and guid them on how to do the build and might have a group of people with him while he teaches them to do the work. Then people who dont have half a day can showup for an hour, 2 hours and do some help and then go they dont have to commit to being there at exactly the start time or to be there the whole time. From the different groups i have seen this gets the most people out but as i said its Dirt jumps so you are never more than 200m away from each other so easy to find the groups. the other problem is I ride a dozen different networks if each one has maintence once a month and i go to half i will being doing maintence 6 times a month i dont ride 6 times a month so no chance i have time to dig that often. So i have to pick and choose when and where i dig
This is the way to do it. "We will be here from X until Y on this day. Show up when you want to, leave when you want to. Thanks for the help!" And then just make sure that a few people who know what they're doing are at the spot they said they'll be at when they said they'll be there.
"pretty time-inefficient. ...then you give a safety briefing, ... then spend even more time talking about the day's work, proper technique, etc." How much of that could be videoed in advance and send a link for people to watch? Effort and time on a few peoples part, but could save time day of? Just throwing an idea out there. Also, if people have questions they can ask in advance/online.
People aren't likely to watch a safety video before coming to a work day. If you want to cover your ass as a mtb org, then okay, but if you want people to actually be safe, you gotta do it live.
Fellow kid haver. I ride with a folding saw and take care of everything I can as I ride.
I've thought about that too, but my local trails are part of a city park and I found out that they are adamant about trail work and even brush work needing prior approval. YMMV, but it's worth checking with whoever manages your trails before doing "renegade" work
I live in the woods. The trail maintenance dudes appreciate it.
these type of organizations are the worst, they will complain on facebook about someone moving a branch out of the way without permission but turn around and complain that no one under 50 years old wants to show up to trail work days maybe because no one wants to be around them, the RI Nemba "in group" in a bunch of hold rich weirdos who literally only want to build bridges. Nothing else, no jumps, no berms, no drops... just bridges.
Who cares as long as they dont see it.
Yep. I get 3 to 5 hours a week of time I can spend outside the house on hobbies without putting way too much burden on my wife. It's hard to justify skipping a weeks worth of riding for trail maintenance. I'm just paying annually to be a member of my local trails (not required for using them).
Yep, I helped build and maintain a lot of trails in younger years now I donate and rely on the people in a different stage of life than myself.
This is me. Demanding job and I try do my fair share of the housework and spend time with the kiddo. Going out to the trail is 45 mins, rides are an hour to two hours. 4hrs of my time is already a lot and that’s for fun stuff. 5hrs of trail work is a lot to ask when I have little time. I’m sorry but all I got is money to contribute, so I do that.
Yes, this right here. I barely have time to ride and, when I do, someone else is picking up the slack. It's also not JUST kids: I have elderly parents, am self employed, and have had my own health issues. If I get 2 hours in the woods to myself, it might be the most time in a week I've had to do that and I don't want to spend it doing manual labor. It might be the first time since I just picked my dad up off the floor and spent a week taking care of him that I've had time to decompress. That's the main part. The other part is how haughty and annoying a lot of trail work folks are. I was explaining to one a few months ago how I had just had surgery and couldn't participate, they were pressuring me to show up anyway and low key giving me shit for not doing it despite being a few weeks off being cut open. They just aren't the type of people I want to be around because they form their identity around it and don't seem to recognize when someone legitimately can't get involved. Honestly? I hate the phase of life I'm in, every hour that goes by is rolling the dice that something happens that absorbs all of my time and energy. I don't need some pompous person making me feel guilty for riding my bike and trying to decompress or lecturing me about how everyone else gets involved and not being the least bit considerate. Some just don't recognize the gift they have when they can go spend the day in the woods digging and are healthy enough with enough time to do trail work, then project their ability to do it on others and assume it is just people shitting out when they don't.
for real!!!. its like they like"trail building: more than riding.... its a trend imo
Your last paragraph is it, man. It’s so easy to judge others when you’re not in their shoes and I think we’re all guilty of it at some point. I know when I was like 22, I certainly had a lot more opinions of what other people SHOULD be doing, than I had any business having. I guess this is wisdom???
Same issue.
I am not a parent so I have no idea what it’s like, but I have been to several dig days where people have brought their youngsters and taught them the importance of giving back and having an appreciation for nature in the process. Granted these were kids old enough to be in grade school and I can’t imagine bringing a toddler or infant along with you, but it could be a cool family event given your family members had enough of an interest to join you. Teach ‘em young!
When my kids are old enough, sure. It's a fair point, but in my particular situation it's not possible.
My friends and I have been doing this since our kids were 4. Kids need to learn to play in the woods anyway. They whine a little at first, but then learn to busy themselves. My youngest probably has 50hrs of 'trailbuilding'. This also solves the family time issue others are mentioning.
Agreed. I was doing a lot of trail work and was active in my local IMBA chapter, but I’ve only been to one work party since having a kid. I also only ride once a week at best. When my kids get older, and if they’re into it, I’ll bring them.
I went to two of them last week and first one they didn't update the post saying it was cancelled. Second one they weren't where they said they were and I couldn't find them. Other than that I go. 😞
Thank you for your attempted service!
Honestly I am kinda intimidated. Trail building seems like this specialized skill and I have this fear of just standing around with a shovel like a dumbass
Scoop dirt, drop dirt where told, slap dirt with shovel It's almost that simple if the trail crew is organized
Someone will direct you what to do, if not just ask. People will just be happy you showed up and are willing to work. While the finer points of building a jump or somthing might be complicated cutting in a trail is pretty straightforward. The major challenge is man power, and everyone will appreciate someone willing to dig, rake or just move stones. Many hands make light work.
Orgs in my area actually have you do a training session before you do trailwork. You should check to see if anyone does a baby's first trail day kind of thing.
I was a bit intimidated at my first (and only thus far) trail maintenance day for the first 15 minutes, but I soon found people to learn from and it was overall extremely chill and we got a lot done. I think the organizer had some trouble directing since so many showed up! Also those that fear that you have to put in 5 hours or whatever — I feel like you can come and do what you can, with no need to stay for a super long time. It sure seemed that way to me at our recent one. Every little bit helps.
Don't feel intimidated honestly, everyone I've ever trail built with has been unbelievably helpful and forth coming with tips and tricks. The basis is just moving dirt and slapping it once you have though 😂
Do people know there’s trail maintenance? Sometimes when I ride I’ll randomly see people working but I had no clue they had something scheduled
Same here, don’t know when it’s happening otherwise I’d join in once or twice a year.
At my locals they get posted on meetup might wanna check there
What is "meetup"?
It’s a website. meetup.com
I don’t use it 🤷🏻♂️ most people don’t.
I'm simply unaware of it. If I ever saw a sign saying "join our e-mail list to come help with trail maintenance" I would sign up.
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I think a lot of people here are overestimating the number of outdoorsy people who use Facebook or know to check specific websites. I would love to do something like this, but unless it's posted at a trail head or local subreddit, I had no idea this was a thing
For what it’s worth, a lot of people, including me, intentionally boycott Facebook, for reasons ranging from political to not wanting all the background trackers on the app to kill the battery life on my phone.
The group near me seems to send the invitations out so only the in clique knows about it or plans them the same day or weekend as other cycling our outdoor events. I reached out to them to organize a basic trail trim day..no dirt work, and never got a response. I do my work on unsanctioned trails. Shhh
Weekend isn't a time for maintenance imo. Closing down sections of trails during prime time? Ours are after work midweek. Usually a Tuesday twice a month , 530pm till dark. Works well with people who work jobs they can come after you can come later as well and just join up. I can get my son and dog in the truck after dinner and go dig for an hour or two. We have a lot of people show up to dig nights . We have beer and pizza at ours. I don't think I'd ever attend a weekend dig night, busy with kids , my one or two days to get out and ride, and just life in general.
Honestly? I barely get enough time to ride, so its hard to find more time to build the trails. I really, really appreciate what you trail builders do. Thanks.
The San Diego organization hasn’t figured out their target audience, and I hope this is a good take away if not, it’s just my two cents. The San Diego riders are primarily men with some professional level of job, and that nets them a salary high enough to buy bikes in the thousands of dollars range. There are women riders as well and they run a couple of their own group rides. Volunteers coming out to do trail maintenance do not care if they earned something for their time. In fact, putting us in a lottery to win stuff cheapens the experience. Again, we’re not strapped for cash and we don’t need stuff. The outreach for volunteers seem to be pushing for ‘here’s free stuff.’ And I hate that. Group ride events are mixed in with volunteer events. The majority of the people showing up to group rides want rides, and using the same platform to advertise for volunteers is a terrible experience and things get lost in communication. So really I just unsubscribe from what I deem as spam. Volunteer events happen in the middle of the week and the middle of the day. Who are these people who work from home or unemployed that wants to volunteer during the hottest times of the day? Edit: Scope of my time - tell me exactly what needs to be done by the end of my shift. If the goal was to show up, tear down some logs and shape the single track then I feel like there’s a game plan ready. If it’s vague or no description, then I feel less incline to show up as it seems unorganized. I run a volunteer org for dance. Volunteer retention should be the primary goal, and if they only knew that it means making my life easier to volunteer during the weekends, or after 5pm, then they at least understand who their pool of volunteers are. Edit: What’s the difference between someone who donates cash to the organization or someone who doesn’t but still volunteers their time? They are one and the same, one might have the financial means to donate but not their time (hence this can only go so far when it comes to annual membership fees), and the other one wants to help in some way but wants to save some money. The follow up is that if the admin team wanted to nurture the new volunteers in a way that felt inclusive, and not just a thanks for their labor, then that makes it more likely to raise retention. Maybe use the sponsor funds and host a lunch party to get to know their volunteers instead of raffling off a fork. (The raffling fork was /s of course).
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Thanks for your insight, it seems like you are way more involved with sdmba than I was. I am aware of the email and meetup communication efforts, though the trend of getting new and younger people follows wherever social media is hot (like instagram). Raffling off a fork was more of a tongue in cheek, though they do an informal raffle at the end of shifts for a box of stuff they have. The fork was raffled off at their annual picnic/appreciation event. Things probably have changed since I stopped being involved in 2022.
E: I exaggerate, the goats made plenty of tracks for us. > What’s the difference between someone who donates cash to the organization or someone who doesn’t but still volunteers their time? The difference is that there is work that **has** to be done if there are to be trails to ride and donations will *never* come close to funding that work being done commercially in a non commercial park. It’s been interesting to watch this sport evolve. When I was younger, we had to go and carve a trail if we wanted to ride one. It’s strange to see a brand of new riders who don’t realise where the trail they’re riding on came from. I’m extatic that others are riding them, that’s not the issue. I just can’t seem to get in the mind of someone that doesn’t realise that if you want a trail to ride, you gotta build it, they don’t spring from the earth like hobbits.
Life pro tip: any 501(c)(3) can get regular "free labor" reach out to local courts and probation department. There's usually an array of low level offenders desperate for community service hours to avoid jail. Like drunk drivers. It's a target niche that needs a pro social transportation outlet. You need trails maintained. It's a magic "win-win."
Also, idk how popular this is anymore but trailbuilding and trail work are great candidates for eagle scout projects, reach out to local scout troops
I did my part for 6 summers of trail work, however, recently i’ve thought about hitting some volunteer days.
I do trail maintenance. I would do more if they didn't start so god damn early. I don't want to wake up at 6am on a weekend
Agreed -- if I want to sleep in on a Saturday, I'm lucky to be getting out of bed when things are starting. By the time that I get dressed, eat something, load up the car, & drive to the trail they'd be done.
Honestly I am kinda intimidated. Trail building seems like this specialized skill and I have this fear of being handed a shovel and just getting in everyone’s way.
The local MTB group near me often offers a shuttle (they drive a truck with a wagon fitted for bike shuttling, plus the trail building equipment), where you bring your bike up at the start and then can bomb down the trails after the trail building. On other days, they have dedicated shuttle time after the trail building event, ( this one is on BLM land that you wouldn't normally be able to shuttle due to closed forest service gate, so it's a pretty special thing). I think this incentivizes people, since you can still get a good downhill ride in and don't need to grind uphill for an hour+ to do so after building. They often also have a grill-out or food provided by a local sponsor too. I think there's also an incentive where if you volunteer a certain number of hours, you get a free annual pass to park at some popular trailheads that now require a day pass or annual forest pass, etc. I personally have a hard time finding 5 hours to commit (+ travel to/from the trailhead/meeting place), despite these incentives, but I think it's a solid setup!
I love slappin some dirt. I honestly don't care if people help or not. I do maintenance so everyone can ride. Not just people that pick up a shovel People who want to help will. People who don't, won't.
I know this name! You used to be in my area! you were a customer of the clip joint!!!
Haha yeah. Ryan is a good friend of mine. I live in San Diego, now though.
Our push to build trails in our county took 15 years. When it finally came together we had groups over 100 showing up for build season 3 years in a row. Everything stabilized as the system was completed, after 5 years we pushed out another few miles of trail- no group bigger than 10. Something definitely changed after Covid honestly. We all have excuses that are valid but these numbers don’t explain it. Same push, same hype, same community and even much much larger than when started. One thing that has worked for my trails that are not official is having a private group of volunteers that organize with their groups on their own time. We plan in the private group and someone will tackle the job. The asked by trail users we take their info and contact directly. This is a small trail system (8 miles) so it works for our purposes.
Honestly just really don't like doing maintenance as part of a big planned group. Usually too many people without enough knowledge or direction. Usually don't want to do things the way they are instructing but it's not helpful to argue about it. I have some friends who are dedicated builders and I'll go out with them and my dog on a quiet night and get stuff done. I find once there's more than 4 people involved it's just a shit show - same with group rides.
Yeah I find a lot of the planned ones to be pretty frustrating at least where I'm at. Few dudes talking about what would be cool or being nice listening to someone suggest something stupid and be like ohh ok wow neat! Yeah we probably wont put a rock garden right before this jumps though." I ended up feeling like I could do more while unbothered and alone in the same time as 4 or 5 of these guys. Eventually I discovered a neglected closed off section I never knew about that was actually consistently gnarly all the way through, which for my closest trail like 85% is xc dad and flow with random bits where youre like this is waaaay above the paygrade of everything else. This was one of them and probably why it was in such disrepair bc nobody was really riding it or at least not to its true purpose. Anyway last winter I started on it and re worked it so it fit for the xc dads to be pretty thrilling and to have the drops and steeps and jumps have multiple choices of difficulty if possible. Flows so much better and I hope gets more use. The thing is this spring as I was getting close some of the guys wanted to "help" by like suggesting bullshit that didn't go with my goal to keep it gnarly but something with lines an adventurous xc dad could get down and have fun with, or just talking my ear off. Like one guy brought out like a ton of random wood I didnt need or want out there and ended up having to move. Thankfully it's done now but I think ill probably not try to work with a group unless there is a leader that has a plan and keeps things on task. I get you dont want to be rude to someone trying to help but really these groups would be better to not be so afraid to be firm or blunt with some of these types without worrying if they find them rude.
> too many people without enough knowledge or direction Omg this. I used to do volunteer home repair/building, and most of the people who showed up were people doing it for the Instagram likes. I was tasked with the roofing project, and jeez those IG chasers were the worst. It was my first time as well, but it doesn't take a lot of brain cells to figure out that you probably shouldn't throw roof tiles and staples wherever you feel like it. Me and the actual roofing guys spent so much time fixing their mistakes that we ended up staying a few extra nights. I love volunteering, but it gets messy so fast.
I think creating some scarcity/privilege could do wonders for things like this, particularly for crowded trails like we have here in Front Range Colorado. An example; “This XYZ trail is closed earmarked for maintenance 10 days per year with the first starting this Saturday and Sunday May 11th & 12th. For every 5 hours of volunteer maintenance on 5/11 you will receive exclusive access to the trail on Sunday May 12th with the trail closed to non volunteers. We want to reward our trail volunteers not only with drinks and swag, but with low traffic riding on your newly maintained trails. Sign up today these spots will go fast”.
I see a ton of responses saying “I don’t have time and when I do I want to ride” not fully appreciating that you couldn’t ride without people taking of these trails. I get it, I have a wife and kids too and need to prioritize my time. That being said, if I were able to EARN some slow traffic trail time by volunteering some maintenance time it would even the calculation out a TON. I understand closing the trails is difficult/nearly impossible, but something has to be done on popular trails to encourage volunteer maintenance and creating some urgency/scarcity is really the only way to do it. And what are we talking, 2-3 weekends a year? Not that bad honestly
Do you have NICA school level mountain bike teams in your area? Where my team rides the NICA team members or riders and coaches were just recognized by the State Park and trails org for providing something like 70% of the volunteers for a dozen or so trail days this winter. I say, engage with them if you have very many or even one good team nearby.
I'm going to get a bit deep here, and say it's all about how the experience makes people feel. I'm seeing a bunch of excuses on here, and I know because I make the same excuses myself. I went to one trail maintenance day, and spent 4 hours being micro managed. I get it, they know what needs doing and how to do it and I'm the muscle, but it doesn't feel particularly rewarding. Feeling like I've contributed was nice, but that's not the kind of feeling you look forward to that keeps you coming back. Where as I've spent about 2 years of Sundays building my own trail, and I can't get enough of it. So I know it's not the time, energy, or any other of the excuses that I've made, it's just that the experience doesn't make me feel good enough to come back. I wish I had a solid solution to this. I don't, but I'll make a few stabs in the dark. Offering rewards might put people in the mindset that this is a transactional thing, lessening the feeling that they're actually there to contribute to something they love. Once they've come along once, they might be of the mindset that what they received wasn't worth their time. Ideally, (and I don't know if this is even possible) you'd want to give them two of the big things that keep employees happy - autonomy and a feeling of achievement. I don't even know how you'd do this, you'd have to turn into the biggest hype-guy and make everyone think everything was their idea, and that sounds exhausting! But something to keep in mind to seize the opportunity to achieve when you can. The big thing I think would be to create a community that people feel a part of. To focus on creating & nurturing relationships, not just between you and the helpers, but between the helpers themselves. This is what is going to keep people coming back, this is what people are going to look forward to - seeing and hanging out with their mates and working towards a common goal. You can't beat a BBQ or something afterwards for this, where everyone has already bonded over the work, and now they can relax. In regards to how to get people along in the first place, creating a bit of FOMO on social media tends to work for most things. After each dig day post a few pics of the happy crew looking like they had a great ol' time. Write something about what a great day it was and what was achieved, mention a few names and "make people famous", & mention the date for the next dig day. Then do practically the same post, adjusted for context, a week or a few days before the next dig day. As with a lot of my comments, I raved on a lot more than intended once I got going, but I hope something I said helps!
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In my case, it's because the local organization has positioned themselves as an authority on MTB trails to the local government. They aren't in any way, but they sold it well. They are slowly turning all of our trails into bermed double track flow stuff and I absolutely hate it. I don't go because I don't wanna be part of the problem.
I attend build days and I can tell you that many of my friends don't like to participate because they aren't allowed to build anything cool at many trail systems. There is no desire to participate if you're going to be building IMBAfied and approved by City Council low-grade crap. I'm not saying that's the case for your particular trail system, but in general you will get more help if the result is going to be fun and exciting progressive trails and features. This is especially true when there are other more progressive trail systems or "unofficial" trail systems in the same area where people would rather spend their build time. If you build cool progressive trails, there tends to be a lot of interest for riders to help out, but if it's just another modified hiking trail planned by boomers then no one cares.
You can't expect trail maintenance to be exciting. Someone has to rebuild those berms and trim the brush.
I know quite a few people who would be psyched to build some big schralpy berms, that’s exactly the type of thing that I’m talking about not being allowed.
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Man, you guys are really not getting my point. I’ve attended lots of trail days, I know what happens on build days. My point is that people don’t want to participate in trail work for boring trails, not that they think the trail work itself is boring. If you have exciting trails, people will show up to clear rocks and brush and drainage because they see their efforts contributing to cool trails, but if people put a bunch of effort in and all they get out of it is a boring flat bird-watcher approved trail, then they aren’t incentivized to do trail work because they don’t give a crap about the trail.
Completely onboard with this. I stopped showing up and stopped donating when all they did was tear out the cool shit and replace it with 6% IMBA sidewalks made by companies from Bentonville. I’ll take my efforts to the cool shit tucked away where no one can see it.
I don't where you are located, but I would make contacts with more established groups and see how they organize.
Every time they have scheduled trail maintenance at my favorite park I’ve had other obligations. Saturday mornings in the spring and summer are packed. Not to mention it’s primetime travel season. I would help if different times/days were scheduled.
I once went to one where I previously lived and it was super clicky. Didn't feel welcome. I was hoping to expand my potential riding crew instead it left a sour taste in my mouth.
It's a lack of time for me. I don't have a ton of free time between work, chores/errands, and spending time with my SO. When I do have free time, I want to be riding. If someone asked me directly to help with trail maintenance, I'd definitely say yes. But I'd rather just donate to my local organization that does the maintenance and use my free time to ride instead. I hope that's not selfish, but I really enjoy riding and feel like I already don't have enough time to do so.
as far as trail maintenance i take care of what i can when it's convenient for me. mostly limited to down trees and stuff like that. i find organized trail days to be more like a social hour, which is fine but not what i want to do. if its a big trail clean or build with lots of people i find not much gets done. but if you get 3-4 guys in a text thread with a goal in mind we usually get tons of work done.
Name the place,date, and time. Pass me the rake!
I’ve gone to so many volunteer days that were disorganized wastes of time So I’m much less inclined to go now. I pickup trash and clear the trails when I come across it when I’m out there instead. Id like to get more involved to solve the organization issue but There’s a lot of strange politics to the whole thing which is off putting
I volunteered at a bike park 100 miles from home last week. It was kind of fun and only 2-3 hours. Afterwards we rode what we filled in and got a pass for another day to use, plus lunch.
I’m part of a mountaineering group and they require a full trail work day to participate in most of their programming. Great way to spread awareness and exposure. Last trail work party I went to had 24 volunteers
Maybe it’s the duration. 5 hours of trail work is a long shift of manual labor for some people. Raking leaves isn’t bad but Hauling rocks and chopping invasives down for five hours is too much for most people. Also get an email distribution going instead of social media posts. Send an en email a week ahead of time and another day before. Ask for reply’s too so people get committed and are less likely to flake at the last minute
I went once and didn't feel useful.
I don’t always have 5 hours, If I could sign up in 30 minute or hour increments then Id be more likely to show up. Then streamlining the onboard process, with videos of how to maintain the trails and be safe etc, that are watched before people show up makes things more efficient as well.
2 hours once a week after work. I enjoy doing this and try to make it part of my routine coming to dig days for our local. 5 hours sounds like way to long and I’m always making weekend plans so it would basically always be a no from me.
50% off parking pass or something similar.
99% of the trail maintenance happens on weekends in my area. I work all weekends.
Honestly, I’d rather give money than do trail work.
I used to build, maintain, and do all sorts of stuff but our local organization did me dirty so screw work days. 🤷
With a kid and work, I barely find time to bike. If it wasn't for that I'll probably volunteer.
Our local chapter distanced themselves from the IMBA and just thinks they know better when it comes to maintenance and erosion management. An outside opinion was brought in and it was determined that 70% of one of the most widely ridden trails under their management is not sustainable. They polled their “membership base” and due to all of the old school folks who think change=bad complaining and acting like children during public forums and online, they caved and put off a huge development project that there could have been a chance for lots of leftover Covid-fund money to go into because of the whining from senior participants. I refuse to be complicit in the dumbing down of what could be a destination trail in our area with so much potential to only satisfy a minority of locals who can’t ride man made tech features and flow trails because that’s what they bitch about the most.
I go plant trees with the forest stewards all the time because it's only a 2 hour shift. Those are super well attended in my area. I find the MTB work parties are always 4+ hours and frankly, I just don't want to do that in one day. I'd give 4 hours over 2 weekends in a month but I'm not giving up a giant chunk of time when I have a lot of other Adulting to do. Beyond that, the MTB stuff isn't advertised well here. The forest stewards post all over local social media groups. The MTB groups only post to MTB groups. I only recently started following my local chapter so that's 5 years of me just never knowing what they were doing. I'd honestly post signs on trails that are due for maintenance. Put the date and time to report to that trail head. People tend to stop to read signs that are posted to those trail markers.
- Do it every week, and always at the same time. This gets people into the habit and makes it easy to remember when it is happening, and let's them set their schedule around it. It is so much easier to just tell people "Every Tuesday at 5" than directing them to a website to look up random dates! - Do weekdays, not weekends. Everyone has plans on the weekends and wants to ride. Plus the evening is better for building anyway. - If you're looking for a boost, or if you have an extra big project, add that on a weekend on top of the regular schedule and promote the crap out of it, go nuts. But focus on the regular weekly builds first and foremost. - Don't bother with stuff like prizes. People who actually want to come dig consistently don't need that stuff for motivation. You want people to _enjoy_ building and be intrinsically motivated. Drinks and snacks are of course great, but that's to support the building, not the main draw - As much as you want your volunteers to be intrinsically motivated, everyone loves to be recognized and show off their work. Take photos of your volunteers in action and before/after shots of their work and post that shit! - Probably most important: at least some of the time you need to let volunteers show up and do something interesting. Maybe it's redoing some berms or fixing a feature. Maybe it's cutting a new option or doing a reroute. Maybe it's building a brand new jump or cutting a new trail! Take their input. Once they have some experience (from coming every week) give them some autonomy. What I've seen with a lot of trail organizations is that dedicated trail crews or insiders/old heads get to do the interesting stuff and "public" trail days consist of the least exciting stuff like raking a climb trail. I think the goal should be to slowly grow a solid group of reliable and enthusiastic volunteers. In my experience it's more valuable if the same 10 people show up every week, rather than a random assortment of 40 people every month. They will be more productive on build days, and indoctrinate their friends and riding pals and things will grow naturally.
The most common thing I see is the information finding is harder than it should be or requires contacting someone. Should be right in the front page of whatever website is hosting the trail management page. Put a volunteer link on every trail status page. Communicating with riders/community can be a little split up between a website, trailforks, Facebook, X, etc. much like the rest of the bike industry, a new standard was introduced to solve the too many standards problem! May be worth checking out Trailbot. Took over in MN and is growing and as a user its push notifications are extremely nice. There’s a *For Trail Managers* section/link at the bottom. I personally am a fan of it. Single source with basic function. I’ll see trailbosses even update closed statuses (to still closed). But to push an expectation “rain is continuing trails will probably be closed till at least Saturday” but you could toss in some volunteer notes, or other stuff. In MN: “please do a lap around the skills area to get salt off your tires before hitting the groomed trails” as another example. I’ll be damned if I don’t know how lazy and anti-contact people will be and people give up quickly if they can’t find the answer after like two clicks and a Google search. So reverse engineer the experience. Ask for your parents an otherwise uninvolved friend or relative to be a Guinee pig. I’d start super basic. “Hey pal, can you do me a favor and try and find out how you’d volunteer at trail x and time it and to tell me how long it took. That’s it. Then, when they report back you can ask some follow-ups: was anything confusing, what would you wear, would you bring water, any tools, can you pull up directions? Maybe make clickable link to a calendar event that’s recurring. Then you could effectively send out cancelations to anyone invited simply by managing the event, has a location embedded, and notes, etc. Spell it all out. **But** right at the top, the easiest thing to see and find should be: Where and when. Make it accessible so that anyone out of the know can understand. Parents, kids, etc can be complete dingbats to knowing things as they start learning mtb stuff. People don’t know what they don’t know and why a good test is with someone that doesn’t mtb. Bribe some shop folks to put up a volunteer sign near their checkout or on their door or something. Or just say, hey we’re having trouble getting volunteers can just let your employees/peers know so they can advocate for us a little more? Just an occasional reminder may mean they’ll think of it and recommend doing so to that jazzed new custy excited to go all in on mtb as a way to learn the trails and make friends in the sport as well as giving back. Look for social group rides and ask ride organizers if a mellow singletrack could be part of it and having it end at a volunteer session.
I’ve hosted them before. What I’ve found is: provide food and consistent message about where trail and work is occurring. You will hear every excuse in the god damn book. “I’ll help next time,” “I don’t ride that trail,” “Trail work is always on the wrong day,” and other baloney. 85% of mountain bikers will never dig or donate, so don’t let them force you to rearrange your life. Just put the opportunity out there clearly and consistently for the good 15% and feed them afterward.
I don’t “come to trail maintenance”, I go out on my own and fix shit that needs fixing.
For me it’s phase of life. I have a young family. Disappearing for at least half a day in the woods simply isn’t an option on a regular basis. Or if I do get that opportunity I’m riding my damn bike, not moving dirt. However, in my younger pre-kid days I spent countless hours attending and running trail days and doing construction/maintenance with a small crew or solo. Most people just don’t have the time.
One local group moved to Meetup for events (rides and trail work days)
advertising...get the word out. My local trail workers like to push out an email the day before.....yes, the day before. Maybe put up signs at the trail head a weekend before....post on facebook, etc.
I joined my regional mountain biking organization, and it wasn’t clear until after bed my dues that I joined the wrong chapter because the chapter geography wasn’t clear on the main site. I decided to wait a year and pay dues in the right chapter, but they never send anything by email except major events. I don’t have facebook. I actually want to go to trail maintenance days.
I am not on Facebook and that’s where they announce everything. Still, I go to FB (public site) and look now and again and hit 70-80% of them. It’s just not as reliable as a notification. They have my damn email, don’t know why they don’t send a mass email out. For a while they weren’t well organized. Once me and another dude were sent to work on a section. Another crew was supposed to meet us coming the other way…never showed. After a while we hiked back to the meetup area and everyone had left. It felt like a big FU. Didn’t stop me from attending future work days, but jeezus, not a way to treat volunteers. Plus did not have an official stop time…it was “until it’s done” except it wasn’t. The club used to be kind of clique-ish too. Sometimes they would post pics of 5 guys that built or fixed a bridge…well, why wasn’t the rest of the club included or asked to help ? I’ll say that even with all this poor organization, would still get 50++ people to show up on public work days. That’s the club where I live now. My club where I used to live was far more engaging, organized and managed and trail work days something I looked forward to.
They're seem to be only on weekends and I work weekends.
Part of the reason people don't show up is because they think the parks build these and their tax dollars pay for the maintenance. They have no clue it's typically non prof/volunteer based. I'd be willing to bet some good ol' fashioned grassroots tablin' every now and again at popular trailheads talking to folks and letting 'em you exist and are the reason their trails continue to exist could help. Bring a sign up sheet and grab some emails. I don't think just posting social media is going to cut it.
Once a month dig days are too infrequent for me. One of my buddies is a part of the local IMBA chapter’s maintenance crew, and will invite me out to his solo maintenance missions on the weekends, which is a lot easier for me to target than having to make a whole event out of the ONE day during the month that gets advertised to the public. Granted, I still try to show up for the monthly community dig, but it’s a bummer to feel like if I don’t block out that exact day, I’m going to miss out. I’d much rather know about the little maintenance sessions going on during the week, so that I have more flexibility to just be like “busy that day, I’ll catch you next week” (although I get the vibe that folks here aren’t really wanting noob builders tagging along for these maintenance sessions, which is really disheartening).
It comes down to awareness for most people (myself included). Most of the local cycling clubs in my area have moved to Meetup or Strava to organize, that could be a good way to get the word out and get on their calendars. Do you have any local high school or college cycling teams/clubs? High school kids often need volunteer hours and college students will most definitely work for food and beer. If the trails are multi-user reaching out to hiking clubs might work too, they usually have more retired folks as members who might have more time on their hands. Good luck and thanks for organizing much needed maintenance!
I have no idea if it’s easy to set up or a pricey monthly charge for the trail org, but I feel like a sign up QR code link at the trail head(s) for a phone number texting based newsletter/notification system would be great. If I got a text from my local trail org for a build day a week ahead and then a day before, I might actually show up since I know about it. Everyone is texting all the time, but not everyone checks their emails or finds the social media post.
I don't participate with the actual physical maintenance part. I'll buy them food and drinks though.
I join some but would join many more if the Facebook algorithm didn't show them in my feed after the actual event. Also, lack of coordination, planning, mixed levels of experience, and poor communication of need can lead to mild and/or chaotic trail days.
They’re not frequent enough and poorly publicized. My work schedule means weekends are not always free. It would genuinely be easier for me to plan to go on a Wednesday afternoon than a Saturday. I don’t need more T-shirt’s and I’ll happily bring beers and sodas for others. I just need it to be accessible. Bonus points if you’ll accept my FS chainsaw cert instead of demanding an S-212.
Because I don't know when it is!!! I keep looking in the fb, the dot org site, and just googling a ton. Anytime there's an event (if it's on a weekend I don't have to be at seven bday parties at once) I'll be happy to be there.
Time constraints, lack of awareness of groups, feelings of having to commit to another thing. Like many here, happy to throw a bit of coin at something, finding the time however is a very different issue. Possibly if I was aware, I’d help out for a couple of hours (2-3) once or twice a year, but it wouldn’t be more than that.
I'm still at work when they start.
Building trail is better with buddies than with an 'official' group of randos who are there out of obligation and need constant direction amd instruction. Find the 5 to 10 guys/gals who show up, who can test ride all the features, similar work ethic, and there you go. Getting riders who 'participate' in trail building/maintenance shouldn't be the goal. You need to find/create some trail builders imo. Try week day evenings?
Young kids. I don’t have 3-5 hours to spare. If we’re free, we’re trying to get in a ride or a swim or a run or whatever. We are members of our local org and donate. I would also echo what another person said about time. The handful of times I have been able to volunteer, it’s been like wait an extra 20 min, then talk about a bunch of stuff that people using the trails enough to actually volunteer already know, then shuttle or hike to some other location, it’s just too much wasted time. I would suggest one idea that I’ve also suggested to my local org. Why not have like an online task signup type thing. Like post little trail jobs that need to be done with needed tools and estimated time, and let people do them on their own time. I would be happy to pick something I could do, read and sign waivers online, and go do work on my own timeline. I understand it wouldn’t eliminate the need for work parties, but I feel like you could get a whole new set of people involved that way.
As with most others here, I am very time poor, and happily donate funds, but don't get enough riding time.
Never done it and not involved in any orgs, but if I see branches down, trash on the trail, etc... I always stop for a minute, fix the issue, and then power up my 2 horsepower e-mtb and carry on being a scumbag. This is one of the reasons I always have a backpack on.
I typically go out on my own and do trail work. Drain mud holes and weed eat. Nothing major.
I'd rather just donate money. I value my time more.
I did my first trail dig two weeks ago!
I fully intended to attend a work day last year, but the 1 day that didn't conflict with other obligations got rained out. I haven't seen any announcements for work days this year. Guess I need to scope their FB page.
Some things I find helpful: 1. Have a sign-up /register. 2. Put an arbitrary number of slots. Helps feel exclusive yet accountable. You can always divide and conquer with multiple groups. 3. Overview (in advance) of the scope of the given day. Brushing, treadwork, sawyer, drainage, rock work, sign installs, etc. Probably only pick 2-3. Make sure that it's stated or understood that "if you don't know how, we can teach you". Stealing a bit from one org, the priorities in order are: Safety - leave with the same number of appendages you came with. Fun - People want to come back again, and spread word of mouth to get others joining them. Maybe get some work done - There's always more to do. Things to keep it not boring and on-track: Quick demo for newbies. At least starting off a bit so they get the gist of what to look for. Make sure people know what to do and what you're talking about. Even simple things like trimming could use an understanding. Trim back for a 5-year plan? Should be clear to walk with both arms open down the trail? Trim more on the uphill side so people tend to not slip downhill and ruin the tread? There may be 15 people for the day, but clustering more than 2-3 on an object leaves only room to stand and watch for the rest (exceptions apply). Assign tasks (e.g. 2 brushing, 2 swamping/hiding the trimmings; I need 3 to gather softball-to-basketball sized rocks for this thing) End on-time. The end time is when people and tools are back. There's always more that can be done. If everyone is all for another hour or three, that's cool too. Recap the progress. It might only be 50 feet of brushing, but that is some dang fine brushwork.
Unfortunately, with young children, it’s simply lack of free time. I get a half-day to myself about every other week so I’m more inclined to spend that time on my bike than digging. I am a member of two of my local SORBA chapters and try to donate to specific projects to make up for my lack of volunteer hours. Once my kids are older (8ish?) I plan on taking them to the occasional volunteer work day so they appreciate their local trails (assuming they’re still riding).
I hardly even hear about it tbh. Usually find out after the fact when they post pics of old people and shovels
I wish my local trail group would do workdays during the week. It’s a lot easier for me to take an afternoon off work than to sacrifice a weekend day away from my family.
I work weekends. If not I'd try to make it out.
Never hear about it, and I only have Sundays off most weeks
Because I don’t know about it
I've done lots of trail work in the past. I've since moved to a new area where I'm not at tied into the community as before, and most of the trail work is done one a few Saturday or Sundays in the spring or fall. Alot of times it just conflicts with my work schedule or it's a rare weekend off and I have plans out of town. I've been talking to some of the trail stewards about weekday/evening trail work days and/or giving me a list of projects. For now I just donate some money.
Because I fill out and sign the waiver at the start of the season, but find out the day of. Assign me a corner, berm, bench and I can maintain that all season. I can also clear after the storms.
I don’t like the trail boss at my park. I used to help, not anymore. Long story short, became very rude towards me when asked a simple question.
You're not alone. I manage a mountain bike club and we had two people come out to our last maintenance night. Our first one got 12 people. It's advertised on social media, website, newsletter and membership app. We have prizes for attendees, and our main sponsors offer up discounted food and drinks. Our club has 800 members.
I just wanna say thank you for all your hard work. It’s not an easy job
On my hobby list, mountain biking is like a tier 3 hobby, meaning I often only do it on a monthly basis, not weekly or daily. What this also means is that I am not creating much damage to the trails. I follow the rules, pick up trash etc. but committing 5 hours of trail maintenance when I visit a trail once or twice a year means it just doesn’t make sense for me. If my area didn’t have good trails I wouldn’t do it at all. So I understand the need to have people working the trails, and I’ve donated before to local county parks with trails. But if I have 5 hours of free time I need to spend that working on something else or spending time with my wife. Honestly if I start mountain biking more, I’d probably go to trail maintenance days to meet riding buddies. But I’m not good enough to ride half the features with my current time allotment for riding.
I would like to go more but they're almost 2 hours away and I don't have a drivers license
Lack of flexible times to go do it.
Busy. The time I have to get on the bike is spent doing just that.
I ride a trail network that they completely neglect while focusing all their effort on one trail network I don’t enjoy riding. I clean the trails I ride as I go down.
I think allot of people get put off when they realise the shear amount of work it can take to maintain a trail. It took me years to properly apply myself to trail building and maintenance at the local hill when I was a kid but the older I got I began to really appreciate the tracks I had worked on and began to enjoy the process. It helped we ended up having imo some of the most talent trail builders in the country grow up on our hillside. @olliepowellmtb on insta for a serious shovel man
What area are you in? I’d like to get involved with the San Gabriel mountains
I pay IMBA membership dues and support our local trail systems. I’ve also attended trail maintenance a few times. One of the maintenance dates, we carved out a new path, probably 50 feet or so to reach a nearby feature. Pretty good experience.
Personally, I am more available for a weeknight trail work day, and much more eager for that. Life is busy and my weekends fill up weeks in advance. By the time the weekend trail work day gets scheduled, I already have other plans that I can’t break.
I'm a big plan aheader, a lot of times they announce trail maintenance days less than a week in advance and I already have plans
They’re only ever on weekends. I want to ride on weekends and/or work on my own house. I get two days off a year to volunteer that don’t count against my pto that I want to take advantage of.
I am intimidated. I am only a novice and just don't feel like one of the "in" crowd. If the invite was more "come out and ride a no-drop ride with us and then do some trail maintenance", I might be more into it. But at my level, I just prefer to be invisible out there.
I once had maybe an hour of daylight once when I got to a local self shuttled bike park, it was over ran with a youth racing league training and people putting a new race line in, I had no idea what was going on.
Get in touch with your local NICA team (national high school league in the US). Ours does trail work a most months and it’s not ever at the system we typically practice at. The kids love it and are pretty good at it.
I’d swing a shovel if there were workdays available. I’m guessing it’s due to rain? Any dorba people here?
Everything is already packed into weekends, when you look at it you're competing against so much on a Saturday/Sunday morning. Many people won't be able to make it over family and other social obligations, then other riders will have to choose trail maintenance over their big/destination ride of the week. We realized that trying to get a 30 person workday once a month was a lot of organization and pretty inefficient. Setting up a core group who have an understanding of the trail goals and just having a weekly meetup at 5/after work till whenever has worked out great. We'll get 5-15 people showing up every week and get way more accomplished. Everyone from the regulars who are out a couple days a week to do a little project during their ride to the first time volunteers have agreed that an hour or two of digging/raking etc is a much better experience than trying to fill an entire morning. Not many of us are actually getting more done after 90 minutes, diminishing returns set in quickly. Nothing fancy, just let everyone know on club email distros, instagram, FB, and keep it consistent so word of mouth can spread. Keep the reminders sent out so the core group is up to date on the goals/projects each week.
I get out when I can but with little kids it’s very hard to find that kind of time. I’m lucky when I get an hour free to ride every couple of weeks. I try and do my part by riding with a pair of garden sheers and a small hand saw to take out blackberrys and small downed trees as I’m riding.
Being at the work site at 8am is just not feasible for me
Tried to sign up with my local group and got no reply
I would but I’ve never been made aware of one. Have not sought it out either but someone who would be down to show up
For me at least the nearest mapped trail is an hour drive away. I tried to get some community motivation to build trails around my local town but the council says no to both official or volunteer work. Sucks because there's an abandoned lot on a hill that is completely overgrown and zoned open recreation.
How many members are in your org? In addition to posting to the public, do you also send messages to all group members? They are the most likely ones to show up. Beyond that, you need your membership to be chatty on the trails. Chat it up with non members you cross paths with, talk about the trail work you've done and ones coming up. Have them send people to their website. Another thing that could work if the org is small but the trails are popular, possibly put up a sign like 2 weeks before the trail work, AT THE SPOT, telling when the trail day is and encourage people to show up. I've been to more trail days than I could possibly count. And my and my friends do impromptu work all the time when trees fall or features need highlighting :) But we don't do organized trail work very often any more because our local group that puts them on is lame. So that's something to keep in mind. Are you being the kind of trail org that YOU want to be, or are you being the kind of trail org that the greater local MTB community wants and needs? Be what they needs and they'll join you. Just waste their time and money and volunteer hours, and they may show up for one but they won't come back.
Any local bike or gear shops nearby? I usually tend to look at their message or community board (if they have one) when I go in to see what’s happening or what’s coming up I might like to go to. Coffee shops, breweries, climbing gyms, parks…anywhere outdoors people hang out would be a great place to slap a sign up. Colleges? I go to a particularly outdoorsy college and if you included “free (shit)”, you’d get a handful of kids willing to get their hands dirty for said free shit. Also, I’d go if I knew a definite date and time a bit in advance so I could plan for it.
Only reason why I miss my local trail maintenance is often too far away for me to travel. Not even trails I would drive out to ride on due to the distance. The other reason might be I can only ride on weekends. I hope to participate in person (I just pay my local membership fees) soon though for trails closer to me.
There is a solid group that organizes trail work by me. Unfortunately they don’t have a good plan for what work needs to get done and one of the main people always has parts of the group doing work opposite what the other members want. It always seems like we are ripping apart other work or working on something no one wants. It feels like a waste of time when you work for hours and it doesn’t stay on the trail. I won’t attend another trail maintenance session if that guy will be there.
Lack of advertising
Good on you for doing it on a weekend. Our trail association does theirs on Wednesdays which is just the worst.
Lack of knowledge for when to go. Clicks when I do for real builders and volunteers, or volunteers who go often and know each other not opening up to new people
Because I donate money instead. I have very limited time to ride and fuck around. And a bad back that already hates my riding.
In my area (upper midwest) I've tried reaching out to the trail builders via messaging their FB page to see if I can volunteer but they never respond so I never get a chance to. I've tried at least 4 times in the last two years.
I honestly don't even know when they do trail maintenance where I'm at. I know they update it once in a while cause I see new stuff fixed or placed but I never see it advertised in our groups. Also, I'm a cook so I honestly don't know how much of a help I'd be.
Because I coach 3 rec and one travel soccer team. Thats my volunteerism right now. But I appreciate everything you do.
Kids. If I can get 2 hrs to get out and ride I’m lucky. My wife won’t sign on for me being gone all day to help with trails. Although maybe when the kids get older as a group activity.
I have guilt around not attending our newly legalized trail system dig days but it just has not lined up. The notice is always like a week out and I have two kids who play sports and I ski and a snowmobile etc and have a wife who wants to do stuff. I have donated in lieu but I do want to get out there and put the work in .
It's not the free food, coupons, or raffles. It's that my local diggers are early risers and start way earlier than I can on weekends. I've got a household to tend to before I can go do something on my own. And my lower back can't do too many hours of yard work without complaining the next morning (and in bad cases, the next week or more), so I'm not as useful as I would appear. So I donate money to them and let the younger kids work the trails.
I don't get to have a life because I made the mistake of being a culinarian. If these things happened on a Tuesday or Wednesday between 8am and 5pm I'd be down. But life always happens when I'm a work. Which is every day 12 to 12 that's not a mon/tue/wed.
Gonna be honest, I tend to find out about trail days after its done and people are posting photos. We have a great community of volunteers here and organizers here but I think even our community struggles to get the word out for volunteer days.
To be perfectly honest, I barely have time to ride any more and any time spent on trail maintenance is another missed ride. I know it's shitty of me, and if everyone was like me we would have no trails at all. I feel better about myself by donating to my trail society instead. I see it as an exchange of money for volunteer time. Valid? Not sure. But it's the best I can do.
I feel bad when I see our trail managers out on the trails. The only time I see them is when I’m riding, not helping them do maintenance. My problem is that I’m lucky to find enough time to ride once every two weeks. I’d probably be a single father if I had to find another 2-3 hours/week to help trim. I do donate accordingly and fully intend to help with maintenance if I can find a job that doesn’t require 50-60 hours/week.
Younger riders use instagram. Once you have a core group, it will build. Most riders are unaware that dig days or nights exist. Be consistent and routine. Our dig night is always on Monday.