Fifty volunteers turned up bright and early Saturday morning for Trails Day, the seventh annual trail-building blitz organized by Patrick Kinghorn of the Kootenay Columbia Trails Society (KCTS).
Trail crews had previously prepared a section along Record Ridge for a rerouting of the Seven Summits Trail, marking the new trail and cutting out logs and vegetation in the way. Thirty five of the day's volunteers met at the Centennial trailhead and walked up for an intense morning of digging out the new trail.
"You never know who's going to turn up," said Stewart Spooner of the KCTS, "but we had a bunch of really keen people and knocked it out in a few hours. It was a beautiful day and went really quickly. It's a beautiful spot, we had great views, and we got a lot done."
Meanwhile, avid volunteer trail builder Ryan Kuhn led 15 others over to the Neptune area where he and other volunteers had built the BS Trail two years ago.
"It needed fine tuning," Kuhn explained. "We had a great day. A bunch of people came out, trail builders, families and kids, and we worked our way up until we hit snowline."
He said the relatively new trail needed "tweaking" as it settles in, and is now "smoother, with new features and better flow."
After the day of labour, the trail builders met up at the Rush Café for a late afternoon pot luck and kegger funded by a group of local freeriders who raised money at the Life Cycles movie fundraiser in Trail last fall, Spooner said.
Meanwhile, trail maintenance crews are "going great," he said. "There's always a lot of work this time of year."
Crews are faced with an "endless list of things to improve," with issues in the spring from winter windfall to drainage repair from damage done by the late and deep snowpack and the extra rain we've had this spring.
"We get the trails open as best we can with the time we've got," Spooner said. "We're waiting for some of the higher ones to clear and then we'll get those in too."
The KCTS has built and maintains a labyrinth of interconnected trails that traverse the full extent of the Rossland Range, many following old wagon roads, horse trails, rail grades, and, the KCTS website reports, "even smuggler’s routes that date back to the late 1800s and early 1900s."
The trails range from wide, gently angled beginner terrain to expert routes with precipitous drops and jumps for technical bike stunts.
For more information about the KCTS and the trail system, including a detailed map, visit www.kcts.ca.