Thursday, June 19, 2008

Longest Day of Trails

Greetings from Bridger Creek:

Tomorrow is the longest day of the year, or about 17 hours of daylight. We are about to begin the gradual change of seasons back to winter (unbelievable given the amount of snow in the mountains!). Last year local architect and cycling enthusiast Dan Harding created an event called the “Longest Day of Trails”, a promotional bike ride to showcase the amazing local trail system we all enjoy.

Dan and the GAS/Intrinsik cycling team (orange bike jerseys you see everywhere around Bozeman) rode their bikes from dawn to dusk completing seven 25 mile loops of the Main Street to the Mountains trail system during the day, or about 175 miles! The event was so successful it is back this year in a bigger and better way. A map of the route is on-line at http://www.longestdayoftrails.com/. The goal of the event is to raise money and membership for the Gallatin Valley Land Trust and their campaign to build the trails connecting the Bridger Mountains to the Gallatin Range south of town. Much progress has been made, yet much work remains.

On GVLT’s trail plate this year are several legacy trail projects: competing the Snowfill dog park and Hedvig’s Trail, facilitating the purchase of the Burke Park inholding, construction of the Drinking Horse Mountain Trail near the M, working toward a redesign of the Bozeman Creek trailhead parking lot, and installation of a pedestrian bridge at the Regional Park. We will all benefit from GVLT’s hard work, but we need to make sure GVLT has financial resources sufficient to compete these great projects. Tomorrow is a painless way to help out.

Montana Aleworks is the event headquarters and by buying a minimum $35 GVLT membership you will receive a $20 discount at Aleworks and an additional $20 incentive from a local business. Spend $35, get $40 in return; easy math. In addition, local bike artisan Carl Strong is donating a custom made bike frame measured for your body dimensions and built in Bozeman to your specifications. My friend Stewart Mitchell of Mitchell construction is donating the components, to make for a $3200 bike build. Raffle tickets will be available with a drawing at sunset tomorrow. This is a good excuse to pump up your bike tires and ride down to Aleworks to support GVLT on the longest day of trails. You can follow the event all day long on FM 95.1 the Moose radio.

Happy Trails,
Stuart

P.S. Thanks to all of you who came out to help with my National Trails Day fence removal project at the Snowfill/Hedvig’s Trail. We are getting close to completing that project and starting to build the Drinking Horse Mountain Trail. More on that later.

Forwarded message from GVLT:
Gallatin Valley Land Trust and the GAS/Intrinsik cycling team invite the public to participate in the second annual Longest Day of Trails on Friday, June 20th. Headquartered at Montana Ale Works, Longest Day of Trails is a dawn-to-dusk celebration of Bozeman’s extraordinary trail system and a membership drive for GVLT.

Dan Harding and members of the GAS/Intrinsik team will ride a 25-mile loop from sunrise to sunset. Harding and company welcome everyone to join the spin around town – be for a few miles, a single loop, or the entire day. There will even be a loop for kids at 3 pm! As always, there are never any fees to use our trail system.
The best way to learn about Gallatin Valley Land Trust and to support their efforts is to stop by the Longest Day of Trails headquarters at Montana Ale Works from sunrise to sunset on Friday, June 20th. Incentive gifts packages from local businesses will be provided to individuals who make a $35+ donation to GVLT. Additionally, Montana Ale Works will host the post-event party where a custom-built Carl Strong bicycle worth over $3,200 will be raffled (Need not be present to win; tickets one for $5; six for $25).

For more information on the Longest Day of Trails log onto http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif or www.gvlt.org.

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