MORRISVILLE - Triangle mountain bikers have a lot to be festive about these days. Trail networks at Lake Crabtree and Harris Lake are expanding. Park managers have loosened their ties and are allowing a variety of cool stunts to be introduced. And a new trail is on the horizon.

Sounds like the perfect time to throw a festival.

That's what the year-old Triangle Off-Road Cyclists thought, too. So Saturday, they're sponsoring the Triangle's inaugural Fat Tire Festival at Lake Crabtree County Park in Morrisville.

"We're looking to get a few more people involved, to raise awareness of what we're doing," says TORC spokesman Steve Greathead.

What TORC is doing is organizing the Triangle's mountain biking community. "TORC," says Triangle trails mogul Sig Hutchinson, "is like the calvary riding to the rescue."

A short history of Triangle mountain biking: In the beginning, there was the N.C. FATS Mountain Bike Club, which played a pivotal role in getting the Triangle's first legal mountain bike network running at Lake Crabtree in 1993. For much of the rest of the decade, though, little trail development occurred locally despite mountain biking's soaring national popularity. The main reason? The sport was new, and park managers were leery of what was being portrayed in the media as an "extreme" activity. Minus an organized effort to convince them otherwise -- and to take on the labor-intensive role of building trail -- there would be no new trails.

That began to change in 1999, when Hutchinson, who does sales and leadership training, bought a mountain bike and inquired about riding on the Falls Lake Trail near his house. The trail was closed to mountain biking; Hutchinson set about to change that. He wasn't able to make that happen, but in the process he managed to convince the state Wildlife Resources Commission to let his loose-knit North Raleigh Mountain Biking Association build a trail network on the north side of Falls Lake, in an area off New Light Road. New Light begat another Falls Lake trail network, to the east at the Beaverdam section of Falls Lake State Recreation Area. Over the next few years, small clubs similar to Hutchinson's NRMBA popped up to build trail at Clayton's Legend Park, Garner Recreational Park and Little River Regional Park on the Durham/Orange county line.

Effective as these smaller clubs were, Hutchinson said a larger umbrella group would be even more so. The area's key trail builders -- all mountain bikers, all volunteers -- agreed, and last year TORC was formed. Since August, the club has signed up 159 dues-paying ($32 for individual memberships, $37 for families) bikers. At Saturday's Fat Tire Festival, they hope to attract more members by offering:

* Kids bike race.

* Beginner and intermediate group rides.

* Trials and skills demonstrations. (Greathead advises that this is a demonstration only, by seasoned tricksters who know what they're doing. Get Out! Get Fit! advises that if you've never seen trials and skills riders, you will be stupefied by what they can do on bikes.)

* Bike maintenance and inspection.

* City and county bike registration. (Helpful, says Greathead, in the event someone walks off with your ride.)

* Raffle.

* Food.

* And perhaps most intriguingly, a Bicycle Toss. "It's throwing an old bike ... to see how far you can throw it," explains Greathead.

TORC also hopes to lure new members by touting its recent achievements. Most notable: spearheading an effort that increased the recommended amount of singletrack mountain bike trail at Raleigh's emerging Forest Ridge Park from six miles to 20. Greathead says the group is also negotiating with a private landowner to establish another trail network.

And, TORC is in the process of negotiating with two Wake County parks -- Harris Lake and Lake Crabtree -- to assume trail maintenance and other duties. Among the latter: conducting regular patrols, offering skills clinics for beginners and rides for kids.

Tim Lisk is the park manager at Harris Lake and managed Lake Crabtree when the Triangle's first legal public singletrack opened there 13 years ago. His take on TORC and similar volunteer efforts:

"When TORC walks into a land manager and says, 'You have available lands, what would you think about mountain bike trails? This is what we already have done, this is what we'd like to do for you' -- that," Lisk says, "opens more doors for the mountain biking community."