River Valley Cycling

Supporting Cycling In and Around Fredericton

2025 RVC Membership Drive

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Join RVC!

River Valley Cycling is Fredericton’s mountain bike club. Our priorities are cycling-community building, skills development, and sustainable singletrack trails. We are a volunteer driven non-profit organization that relies on the support of your membership, our volunteers, and the support of partner landowners and local businesses.

Your membership for 2025 will help us succeed and it goes a long way towards maintaining and growing singletrack trails in the Fredericton region. Land access and trail maintenance come with costs, and your support ensures that our RVC Trail Crew has the tools, materials, and insurance they need to keep going. You’ll gain access to RVC group rides, social events, and you’ll be able to register for our races and skills development sessions. We know mountain biking isn’t the most accessible sport, but it can be a family sport – so parents / guardians can add riders under 18 to their membership at no extra cost!

Last year about 20% of our members chose to generously give more to RVC through a Gold or Platinum level membership. Thank you! These options provide us the funds we need to take on those ‘extra’ projects that we couldn’t otherwise do. New signage, volunteer appreciation, and better quality tools for the RVC Trail Crew are only possible because of the generosity of our Gold and Platinum members. You benefit too with perks like being able to add all of the adults in your household and advanced opportunities to register for sessions that have limited capacity.

RVC has big plans for 2025

Programming

Expect beginner group rides, e-bike rides, women’s+ rides, social rides, and a big year-ender as always. Expect both beginner and advanced skills sessions delivered by PMBIA coaches. Our highlight Wooly 4 Race and the Enduro Series are coming on!

Trail Upgrades

Our club priority for trails in 2025 is upgrading. We will host a Monday night build series that will rotate around our trailheads. We’re sure that something new will get built but the focus this year is pouring energy into trails you already love.

Growing the Network

Everyone knows we’ve been working with the City of Fredericton to plan an all new trail network at Killarney Lake. This is the year. We’ll take every opportunity to work on your behalf to see this project succeed. Momentum is building.

Join RVC!

RVC’s 2025 Annual Meeting Wrap-up

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The year behind us…

RVC is closing a tremendously successful year. We hosted more ride programming, more races, and more skills clinics than we ever have before. We diversified our offerings by growing short-track racing, enduro, and women’s+ rides. The year wasn’t without challenges – particularly the 2 month closure of the flight deck. Winterbike was amazing thanks to RVC’s dedicated grooming team in February and March and Fredericton also enjoyed the return of some winter trails that have been resting for the last few years.

Volunteer builders and maintainers delivered huge trail upgrades last year. The MVP flight deck did see a lot of work on Pinball, D-Track, and Monkey Business. Penniac got some new bridges installed and a renovation on Learning to Fly. Volunteers were also out in force nearly every week at Woolastook contributing to our multi-year success completely modernizing that riding area. Expect more improvements in 2025 including new signage to go up at Wooly.

Club corporate health

RVC is stronger than it has ever been. Our membership in the summer and the winter matched our all-time high marks. We’ve added 200 summer memberships in the last 2 years to completely recover what was lost during the pandemic. RVC has never had more people offer to voluntarily take out ‘gold-level’ memberships in order to support a little extra. Driving up membership isn’t the purpose of our club but it is something we view as a measure of whether we are getting it right.

Financially the club is healthy. We take in about the same amount of money as we spend and we spend only to invest in our mandate to grow mountain biking in our region. Remember – RVC is 100% volunteer so nobody’s getting paid. Our biggest single annual expense is insurance – which protects the club and is a necessity for most of our landowner access agreements. The club’s success at fundraising through donations, grants, and events has allowed us to keep your membership prices extremely low – and we have no plans to increase prices in 2025.

This is a good time to shine a light on all of the generous local businesses and government partnerships that have helped make us successful over the past 12 months. Without this community, we couldn’t do it. Please support companies that make a point to give back!

Changes within RVC’s board

RVC is run by a volunteer board. Everyone rides, and everyone brings professional skills to the table. We recently wished our club’s Vice-President, Mike Hutchinson, good trails ahead as he has decided to move on after almost 10 years of service. Mike has helped grow this club in many ways – from securing our first insurance policy to creating partnerships with landowners, and launching our biggest trail project ever. We all owe thanks to him. Luckily RVC’s Women’s+ Director, Rachel Garland, has offered to move into the VP role. This transition is going smooth and we all welcome the positive energy and ideas Rachel brings to this role.

Big things coming up

We have iron in the fire and RVC is moving on big ideas. We’ll need your support. On April 15th we will launch our annual membership drive and we would love it if you would join. Ever better – let us know how you want to volunteer. We need people interested in adopting trails, organizing trail days, leading group rides, or creating quality social content for us. That’s how this club works. Need inspiration?

Killarney Lake Park Trail Plan

We have been working as partners with the City of Fredericton on the design of a singletrack network at Killarney Lake Park. This will change the landscape of riding in town. We’ve walked the ground together, drawn lines on maps, and spent lots of time talking about what’s important. RVC has high confidence that the plan the city announced this week will be done well. The 32 km plan will begin with 15 km professionally built in 2025 and 2026. The plan includes beginner and adaptative-bike friendly trails, a skills park, flow trails, and technical XC on some great terrain in the back. The city staff have been excellent, and we believe these trails will be built with purpose – enabling both local rides and high-end competitive events. RVC began working on this in 2015 and 2025 looks like the year it happens!

Crabbe Mountain

Crabbe Mountain has been developing vertical riding terrain and they’ve approached RVC with an idea for partnership. There are many obvious benefits – and Crabbe represents a stable partner with possibilities for enduro and DH riding that nobody else in the Fredericton region can match. It’s an interesting idea. We are exploring what a partnership could look like, how both organizations benefit and how risks would be shared. We don’t yet know where this will go but the RVC exec has decided to spend real time exploring the options. We’ll have more to share as the discussion progresses.

The wrap-up

  • RVC is healthy and growing. Momentum continues into 2025.
  • Our most valuable resources are our members, volunteers, and partnerships with landowners and the business community.
  • When we launch our membership drive on April 15 – please join RVC!

RVC’s 2024 Membership Launch

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We are in the shoulder season. The trails are trying to dry up but they’re not quite ready to ride. The big spring thaw can feel like it takes forever! We just wrapped up our Annual Members Meeting and we got some terrific feedback that we’ve been using to help plan our 2024 season. Here’s what we’re thinking.

If you don’t feel like reading you can just skip right to our registration page:

Join RVC Now!

Trails

  • There will be new trails opening at Woolastook that were built by Kodiak last year. Please be patient. We’ll open them as soon as we can without risking early season damage.
  • Professional build efforts as well as volunteer trail days posted through our social channels will continue to happen at Woolastook. Get involved!
  • We’re waiting to hear about our application to the Canada Summer Jobs program. Fingers crossed we can have a trail crew again that will focus on maintenance throughout our trail network.
  • We’re planning a significant tune-up at MVP including the flight-deck.
  • RVC will continue to advocate for access with landowners. We’ll champion responsible trail use, etiquette, and we’ll work hard to maintain relationships we’ve built. RVC has recently made some big progress at Penniac that we’ll be sharing with our members soon.

Riding & Events

  • We’ll continue the super popular Getting-Ready-To-Ride series, social group rides, and skills-development sessions.
  • Riders loved both the Enduro Series and the Short-Track races. Both are in the works for 2024.
  • We are aiming to offer rides and skills sessions specifically for Womens+ riders – new!!
  • The Woolastook 4 should be fantastic. New terrain will totally change this experience.

RVC Membership

  • Club membership is important. Your support keeps our singletrack in top shape.
  • For 2024 we’re keeping our rates the same (unlike everything else in life these days)
    • Individual membership – $45 / person
    • Gold membership – $125
    • Platinum supporters / sponsors – $200+
  • All youth riders under 18 years are free with a guardian/parent membership of any level. We made this change last year to help support single-rider parents.
  • Many of you took out an auto-renewing membership last year. That option is still available and we encourage riders to use it. It really helps the club plan knowing we’ll have your support. If you can’t remember when your auto-renewing membership will roll over, we posted a list for you!
  • The experiment with plastic tags in 2023 was cool. But support wasn’t strong enough to keep that going in 2024 – so we’re going back to stickers! They’ll be available at local bike shops soon.
  • Gold and Platinum options are there to offer ways for individuals, families, and businesses to really give back and invest in our cycling community! These options allow you to add all the riders in your household. Last year we had dozens of riders choose these options. Incredible support!
Join RVC Now!

Winterbike 2023/24 Launch!

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We are rolling heavy towards another winter season and we are ready. Behind the scenes the club exec and our volunteers have been working away to get prepared for a great season of grooming. What have we been up to?

Preparing

Our volunteer groomers put in a lot of time even before the first snow flies. A lot of time is spent planning the grooming routes, and making sure that our fleet of hard-working sleds are well maintained. Dan Breau and Tim Dine have both spent time replacing old worn parts. There’s time spent setting up our parking lot plows and clearing trails of late fall blow-downs. You may have also seen the slick new winterized RVC logo that Christina Tracy did for us! The exec has worked to flip our membership registration over to winter mode (join for 2023/24), and prepare a budget.

Fundraising

Early this spring we set a goal for ourselves – a new sled for our longest-serving volunteer snow-sculptor: Dan Breau. For those that don’t know Dan, he is our groomer who has been looking after MVP since winterbike first evolved beyond early experiments. We’ve come a long way since Wilson’s Loop was kept open by running a leaf blower through the first few snowfalls. The thing is that our fleet of sleds that pull the grooming gear are old, and the maintenance is high. So – we set out to find the money needed to buy RVC’s first brand new sled. With the help of long-time volunteer Kelly Murray we applied to the City of Fredericton’s Community Grant program and we just got word that we were successful! They’ve agreed to put forward $6,500, about half of our target, if we can find the other half. We think we’re just about there. We had some money left in the piggy bank from previous fund raising and we think we can sell some of our older assets to make up the rest. All without raising membership costs. We’re excited.

How can you help?

  • Trail clearing – if you have time for a shoulder season project we need someone to walk the length of Back 40 and Cakewalk at MVP and clear any downed trees. Same goes for Islandview. If you are going to clear trail please let us know what sections you’ve walked and whether you’ve taken care of everything. Keep in mind the groomers need more room to pass than a bike.
  • Shoe-to-ride – we could really use a few dedicated people to lead up some purposeful snowshoeing. Our top priority is to have people willing to hit Odell park after snowfall. For fatbiking we need at least 3 shoes wide and you need to be able to follow the trail once it’s covered up with snow. We also want someone willing to take on a short section at Islandview (~375m) from the parking lot to the last point where Jeremy is permitted to groom. Jeremy does an amazing job but this first bit needs a dedicated person to beat it down.
  • Join RVC Winterbike – this is how you can all help us. Your membership covers all of the basic necessities that our fundraising doesn’t. Gas, insurance, plowing, parts, etc. For a modest contribution you can enjoy our groomed trails and get access to group rides and events.

Proud Members of: Velo New Brunswick

Canadian Cycling Association

International Mountain Biking Association