River Valley Cycling

Supporting Cycling In and Around Fredericton

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Hinterlands Who’s Who – the Trail Gnome

April 27, 2025 By Chris Norfolk

Nature lovers – today we will learn to identify the reclusive Northern Forest Trail Gnome (Sylva nodignoridi). The activities of this species are beneficial to many other forest creatures and learning to identify the signs of these gnomes lets you understand where they are, even if you don’t spot one while out in their habitat.

While it is difficult to directly observe this species, you can positively identify them by their preference to wear rugged, less fashionable clothing. They often appear dirty. Gnomes give off a distinctive odor which has been described as a combination of tree sap and loamy dirt.

Northern Forest Trail Gnomes are known for their high-energy output and active metabolism; needing to consume large quantities of food and sometimes beer in order to maintain their activity levels. Both male and female gnomes are active throughout the year. Most activity occurs during daylight hours, however a rare nocturnal variety preferring the cover of darkness do exist in some habitats. Gnomes display behaviour which can be thought as opposite from beavers. They prefer dry areas, and will work feverishly to drain puddling water. Rather than gathering fallen trees, sticks, and debris, Northern Forest Gnomes will clear their habitat of such litter. They move in a weaving pattern throughout the forest and are suspicious of strait lines. They go to great lengths to avoid going strait up or down a steep slope.

Gnomes do leave some telltale signs of their existence which you can learn to spot. While some myths and legends exist, be certain that these gnomes are real – and they leave evidence behind.

Foraging – Evidence suggests they may eat the lower branches of trees. Gnomes can reach up surprisingly high. Fresh cut stubs can indicate activity in the area.

Scat – It’s often possible to find ‘piles’ of gnome droppings, particularly after windy storms. These droppings resemble sawdust in appearance.

Caches – Gnomes will often distribute caches of equipment throughout the forest much like a squirrel hiding seeds. Often a gnome is behind seemingly random buckets, shovels, and rakes placed carefully in the woods.

Trails – Heavy presence of Northern Forest Gnomes in an area will often result in well worn trails along their normal movement corridors. These trails are then used by other forest species such as mountain bikers (Velos offroadei) and trail runners (Cursus twoleftfeeti).

The Northern Forest Gnome is a species of concern for conservation. Their numbers have fallen in recent years. Fortunately organizations like River Valley Cycling are supporting gnomes by doing what is possible to protect their habitat and provide them with essentials for their activity (tools, insurance, and landowner agreements). What can you do to help?

  • If you encounter a gnome in their natural habitat treat them with respect. Slow down and say hi.
  • Offer to assist a trail gnome for a day, educating yourself through total immersion.
  • Support a local non-profit that supports Northern Forest Gnomes in your area.

Join us this spring and summer as RVC organizes weekly “Maintenance Mondays” trail sessions. We’ll be touring all of the trail networks in the area. It’s your chance to learn from trail gnomes and take direct action to help them!

  • MVP- April 28th
  • Penniac- May 5th
  • Woolastook- May 12th

Filed Under: Announcements, News, Responsibility Tagged With: trail crew

2025 RVC Membership Drive

April 15, 2025 By Chris Norfolk

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!

Filed Under: Announcements, Membership, News Tagged With: News

RVC’s 2025 Annual Meeting Wrap-up

April 5, 2025 By Chris Norfolk

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!

Filed Under: Membership, News

2025 Annual Meeting

March 16, 2025 By Chris Norfolk

Our 2025 Annual Meeting is coming on the evening of April 2nd. Once again, we will be hosted by the folks at Grimross who have offered up their taproom for the club meeting. This is your chance to meet the club executive, learn about the accomplishments over the past year, and what’s coming up for 2025. This event is open to all riders – so even if you aren’t an RVC member (yet) it’s your chance to learn what the club is about. See you there!

RVC Exec

Filed Under: Announcements, News Tagged With: AGM

Multi-year Woolastook refresh in the home stretch.

January 18, 2025 By Chris Norfolk

We’ve shared lots of progress updates over the past 2 years and it looks like we are ready to share the the big picture. This is the result of RVC’s effort to build a brag-worthy trail network that will anchor Woolstook on the map for another whole generation of local mountain bikers. While a trail network like this is never really done the major construction we imagined with our master trails plan is now mostly complete.

Woolastook now has:

  • 20.7 km of trail at a range of grades
  • 10 hub junctions designed to make navigation in-woods easier (fewer intersections)
  • Stacked loop options so you can choose your adventure and distance
  • A beautiful backcountry – accessible with a proper climber – including a flow descent – and a view!
  • A name for every trail – we landed on “Obsession” for the flow line down from the deck

Here’s the new trailhead map that’s getting installed soon:

Click the map to download a geo-referenced high-res .pdf … and we’re on Trailforks as always

This trail project embodied local success at its very best:

Grassroots club organizing. Nearby towns signing letters of support. Local volunteers putting in sweat. A phenomenal local bike shop partner. A hometown hero running the network design. Two Maritime professional trail building companies. Lumber from a local sawmill a stone-throw away. Signage from a local print shop. Local businesses stepping forward to help. Secure access to public land. Government funding a project to benefit the local community. This feels good.

Aside from the map our main trailhead sign is going to include plates to give credit to all of the volunteers who played a big role in making this place the gem that it is now. Work isn’t going to stop – and despite the best build quality these trails are going to need maintenance – but we’re ready to call our project successfully finished. We hope you like the result.

On to more big things.

Filed Under: Announcements, News Tagged With: Woolastook

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