MBOSC Presents Freedom Riders at the Rio Sept 17

MBOSC presents the Santa Cruz showing of Freedom Riders 7 pm Thursday September 17th at the Rio Theatre on This film is a benefit to raise money for our local State Parks district to replace the sign at the entrance of the Wilder Ranch back country.

Tickets will be $10 at the door and will include a raffle ticket. We will also sell additional raffle tickets in the theater.

Freedom Riders is the story of a core group of riders who evolved from covertly building rough and unsustainable trails, to creating a precedent setting relationship with the Forest Service and creating some of the best Freeride trails in the country.

MBOSC is presenting this film because we feel it’s a story that could resonate in this community and it could lead to some wonderful future possibilities in our local scene. The current state fiscal crisis and the change in leadership in the local district is creating more dialog between land managers and the local mountain bike advocates. They are looking for allies and partners. Since February, we have been actively working with our local State Parks district to create more legitimate mountain biking opportunities. We are inviting local land managers to the showing of this film and hope that they can see how co-operation between downhill/freeride mountain bikers and land managers has worked in another part of the country.

Hope to see you there!

Tahoe Trip 2009 was a success!

We had about 70-80 riders from 5 northern California clubs: MBOSC, ROMP, BTCEB, BONC and FATRAC. We had a movie night, a raffle and lots of beer. The location was great except for the late night construction on the first 2 nights.

There were about 26 riders/campers/trail workers from MBOSC and we had a lot of fun. Lots of beer was consumed, many rides were done and the trail building day was successful. There were many ride options this year for different abilities. The highlight for me was riding up to Armstrong Pass and down Mr Toads. An awesome and epic-y ride! Another highlight was sharing the Tahoe Rim Trail from Tahoe Meadows to Tunnel creek with my daughter. I was so happy to be able to show her those majestic views.

We had about 70-80 trail volunteers construct 860 ft of full bench cut trail for the Donner Lake rim trail. Many rocks were moved to build retaining walls, stumps removed, manzinita hacked, dozens of wheel barrows full of dirt were moved and about 6 large fallen trees were

moved off the path of the trail. Be proud of yourselves, folks. The finished trail was really impressive!

I would like to thank Linda George for being the lead organizer of this event. Dave George for baking 2 apple pies and cookies for Eve's birthday party. Sebastien Praly for brewing 2 kegs of great beer over the course of this summer for this trip. New Belgium Brewing company for donating many cases of beer (the cold brew after trail work was the best!) Tracey Cotten for volunteering the use of his truck for shuttling mountain bikers, tools and beer - and for sharing a bottle of high quality Tequila! Many others deserve thanks including all of you participants. I'm glad to have got to know so many cool people a lot better.

I would especially like to thank Steve Gemelos for organizing the MBOSC participants. Steve's organization and communications made the event run really smoothly for MBOSC.