Looking Forward at 2022
Happy New Year!
Congratulations on a great season of riding and thank you to all members and volunteers! Although our mountain biking season is coming to an end, we hope that everyone is getting excited for fat biking and other winter fun! 2021 has been a great year for our local mountain bike scene, so we thought we’d share a few of the projects and events that have been ongoing, and some that we look forward to in 2022.
Trail Building
TWBU Trail Funding: We’re still in the hunt for funding to build The Way Back Up and Duncan’s Way Up in the Duncan’s Gulch trail network. We will be applying to the province for the last portion of funding, and aim to begin machine building these trails in the spring of 2022.
Discussions for new trails this winter: We’re sure you all have many ideas for new trails this winter – and we’d like to support you when we can. If you have ideas, please write, or come to our meetings to help plan the development of the network!
Hospital Access trail: We have some funding from the City of Corner Brook to start constructing a shared use trail between Grenfell Campus and the hospital site. There are still some discussions between the WCCA, Grenfell Campus, and the City on an agreement to make sure all parties are happy with the details of the project.
Trail Maintenance and Grooming
Our trails always need love, and we have had some great volunteers maintaining our trails this year – thank you!
Fat Bike Trail Grooming: We will be grooming the trails in Massey Drive this winter once again! Our snowdogs are serviced and ready to go, and we’ll store them in a trailer near the Massey Drive trail network for easy access. This is shaping up to be an excellent winter for fat biking but we absolutely need volunteer help for grooming. If you’re reading this and you plan to ride your fat bike this season, please sign up for our Fat Bike Grooming Training Day on January XX.
Plan for SWASP this summer: Thanks to your generous contributions through trail pass purchases and donations, we will be hiring two students to do some maintenance across our trail network.
Duke of Edinburgh: In the same spirit as last year, we plan on having the D of E volunteers help clear the trails. They put a lot of great work into clearing leaves and debris last spring, so thank you to those volunteers!!
Community Build Days: We’ll be hosting two community build days this year. We’re currently planning for Saturday, May 14th for a spring build day, so mark your calendar now! If our winter runs especially long, we’ll re-evaluate as we get closer.
Trail Promotion
As we build and maintain trails, we aim to make them easier for people to find and use. We also would like to make sure that tourists can come and enjoy what the area has to offer. With more trail users, our job of getting funding and volunteers becomes easier.
Mountain Bike Atlantic (MBA): Thanks to the help of Andrew King, Mountain Bike Atlantic has completed a trails assessment in Newfoundland and our trails have been approved. This assessment process evaluates the trail networks for marketability and provides recommendations on improvement. If you’re unfamiliar with the Mountain Bike Atlantic program, visit their website at https://mtbatlantic.com. The assessment is the first step in having our trails featured here and included in the wide-ranging marketing and promotion efforts of the mountain bike experiences in Atlantic Canada. In fact, the preliminary work of including the Western Region trails on the website has been completed and the trails are searchable on the site: https://mtbatlantic.com/trail/newfoundland-western-region/. There’s still some work to be done and the primary areas of focus for improving the trail network is wayfinding – that is, helping first-time trail users find their way between the different trailheads. This is something we’ll focus on in 2022.
Our website: For those who have not yet visited, you can find our website here (https://www.wccanl.ca/). Please visit for trail info, news, and to get in touch with us if you’d like to help build or volunteer. Moving forward, we will also be posting the minutes from our WCCA board meetings on the site so that you can stay in the loop on what we’re doing.
Trail Passes: Trail passes for 2022 will go on sale in January. Stay tuned for the updated design for this year.
Trail Signage: While some of our trails have signs, we have also been building new trails faster than we have been making signs. We hope to add to our trail signage, and include some additional directional signage located at major trail intersections (for example, near Trout Pond). Ideally, we will couple physical signs with QR-codes to link to digital trail maps and the WCCA website.
Events
Many of you have asked for more events, so we would like to support new events in whatever way we can. In partnership with others, and through some well-organized teams, there are a few events slated for the upcoming year:
West Coast Fatbike Fest on the afternoon/evening 19th of March – This event will be a team relay format at Blow Me Down XC Ski Club. There will be fatbikes, food, beers, and good times! We will share registration links and more event information in the next couple of weeks.
School Series: There is a planned school event for the spring of 2022, where the WCCA will help support a local teacher and a local school to hold a trail event for students.
Corner Brook Enduro Event: There is a great committee organizing an Enduro Event for the summer of 2022 – more information to come. We would like to see this become an annual local race, as it is not likely the crew from St. John’s will be hosting one in the coming years. For those who would like to volunteer to help, please write to: info@wccanl.ca
XC Races: We’ll have a more cross-country style race event in 2022 as well. Dates and details will be announced over the winter.
Thanks for reading! Hope to see you at our next meeting.
-Billy Newell, Vice President