The award-winning Kootenay Mountain Culture magazine has just featured Castlegar in a story that highlights the city’s mountain biking and, specifically, the work done by local Dave Sutton and the Castlegar Mountain Bike Society.
The article, entitled “He’s Gotta Nice Build” describes all the work Sutton and his team of volunteers have done in the past five years to create unique mountain bike trails in the area and how they’ve put Castlegar on the map among singletrack aficionados. The trails mentioned in the piece, which appeared in the Summer 2018 issue of KMC magazine, are the same ones described on this website in our “The Top Mountain Biking Trail in Castlegar” blog post. But the trail network that the author Valerie Rossi primarily concentrates on is Merry Creek and specifically the “Merry Go Round” trail with its “Cliff Hanger” feature. Rossi writes, “Dangling from an 18-metre-high sheer rock face over the forest floor, the 20-metre-long bridge structure is one of the triumphs of the Castlegar Mountain Bike Society. To create that masterpiece, Dave Sutton hauled in a half dozen heavy metal brackets and used cement, expansion bolts and a cordless drill to rig them to the side of the cliff. Ten rechargeable batteries later and the footings for the area’s most epic bike bridge were secured in place.”
The article goes on to describe how Sutton was born and raised in Castlegar and how he started mountain biking at 13 years old. Today he works at Zellstoff Celgar as a carpenter, which is why he’s so talented when it comes to building structures such as jumps and bridges. It’s also where he gets some of the material for his creations, “digging through on-site scrap piles of steel pipes, rubber belts and drag chains so he can use them for trailbuilding,” the article says. When he’s not at work he’s either biking or working on bike trails with the help of the Castlegar Mountain Bike Society, which he found.
“In 2012, the CMBS joined forces with the Castlegar Parks and Trails Society, becoming an official club eligible to apply for grant money,” Rossi writes in the article. “And with volunteer energy amplifying his efforts, Sutton is helping solidify Castlegar as the next great Kootenay biking destination.”
To read the article in its entirety, log on to Kootenay Mountain Culture’s website at: mountainculturegroup.com/dave-sutton-and-castlegar-mountain-biking.