News – Page 3

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!

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

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.

Launch of Winterbike 2025!

December 1, 2024 By Chris Norfolk

It snowed! More is on the way. Get your fatbike ready!!! While you are doing that the club exec and some big volunteers have been working away to get prepared for a great season of grooming. What have we been up to?

Preparation

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. The team have been sourcing parts and making sure everything’s tuned up and ready to go with our grooming fleet. There’s time spent setting up our parking lot plows and clearing trails of late fall blow-downs. The exec has worked to flip our membership registration over to winter mode (join for 2025), and prepare a budget. There’s been some work planning out loops that will be groomed this winter especially at Wooly where the network has changed quite a bit this year!

How can you help?

Trail clearing – if you have time for a shoulder season project we always appreciate anyone willing to walk trails (especially the out-of-the-way ones) 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.
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. This year we are doing early-bird pricing. Lock in your membership before January 1st, 2025 and you’ll pay a discounted rate of $30 / adult. For all of you who took out an auto-renewing Winterbike membership last year – no worries – you automatically get renewed at the discounted rate!

Keep your fingers crossed for snow snow snow snow!

MVP Update: Time for a Tune-up

September 20, 2024 By Chris Norfolk

MVP remains at the core of mountain biking in Fredericton. We have a chance to get it put back into amazing shape for some great fall riding. We need volunteer help – your help!

The Good News

We were contacted by the landowner of the Flight Deck area yesterday and told that we are now welcome to enjoy the trails again. This is fantastic news from a landowner who has been very generous to the club. We know that the temporary closure really hurt this summer but it’s now finally over.

This weekend club execs will head in and start removing the trail barriers and the closed signs. We’ll be doing a safety inspection on all Flight Deck trails since it’s been some time since we’ve had eyes on them and there could be downed trees or other hazards. Not all trails will open immediately. If there are still barriers in place please continue to respect them. In particular, we are not sure about V-Fib. The harvesting took place very close to that trail and it may have been impacted directly. We’ll wait and see how it looks during inspection and we’ll make a plan from there.

What you can do to help us open everything quickly is pitch in. We expect everything in the Flight Deck area will need to be trimmed back with loppers and line trimmers to re-establish lines of sight. We also expect that everything needs a good raking for loose rock that’s accumulated on the trail surface. These are really easy jobs that don’t take any special trail building knowledge. Any rider can help and you can do it on whatever time works for you. Just let us know what you plan to take on so that we can try and send volunteers to the areas they are needed most. While we are on topic – the MVP beginner zone needs the same kind of love so we are looking for Bunkerama, Wright of Way, Velocity, and La Woodstock to also get some attention.

The Other Good News

For whatever reason – the beavers seem to have left Bunkerama and the pond is now gone. We think this means we have a great opportunity to get this trail cleaned up and back into shape for fall riding. A good raking and clearing debris should be all that’s needed – but we need people to step forward.

Get Involved and Support the Work

Get in touch with us via email or messenger and let us know you are willing to help. We can supply loppers / rakes / and trimmers and we’d be happy to point you in the right direction. Let’s get MVP into great shape for fall riding! You can also help the club by getting your membership if you haven’t already for 2024! It’s not too late. Membership funds pay for tools, gas, insurance, and other costs we have to keep trails open.

Join RVC