That's why he spent two hours on the phone Monday pricing trail-building tools, three hours Tuesday with a tool salesman, and another three at a meeting that night advocating trails for a new Wake County park. Then he spent three more hours in meetings Wednesday night and Thursday, and on Friday spent hours testing a machine that carves single-track trail from the side of a slope.

"Sometimes it's hard to find time to ride," says Bryan, 53.

What do the meetings, phone calls and machine tests have to do with mountain biking?

Everything, if you want a place to ride in the Triangle.

Bryan, of Chatham County, is the incoming president of the Triangle Off-Road Cyclists, a year-old nonprofit organization dedicated to giving mountain bikers places to ride.

The all-volunteer club's advocacy is why eventually there will be 20 miles of mountain bike trail at Forest Ridge Park on the shores of Falls Lake and smaller networks at two future parks: White Deer in Garner and the northern Wake landfill in Raleigh.

The group's latest success is at the Briar Chapel housing community being built off U.S. 15/501 south of Chapel Hill. Thanks to the nonprofit, and especially to Bryan, Briar Chapel will have at least 25 miles of trail, making it the biggest single-track trail network in the region.

That is nearly 70 miles of new mountain bike trails in all. Coupled with the 100 or so miles already on the ground, that's a lot of recreational fun -- most of it built by volunteers at no expense to taxpayers.

A hobby blossoms

Bryan's arc as a mountain biker shows how this phenomenon of cost-free public works came to be.

Twelve years ago, he was looking for a way to connect with his then 12-year-old son, Nathan. Nathan had just started mountain biking with a friend; Bryan decided to give it a try.

"I borrowed an old mountain bike that was too small, and we rode to some local trails," Bryan recalls. "I looked like a circus bear on a bike."

Despite his sideshow appearance, Bryan was hooked. He bought a bike better suited to his lean 6-foot frame and started looking for places to ride. That was when the seeds of his volunteerism were sown.

"There wasn't much else around here," Bryan says.

The only legal trail at the time was a four-mile network at Lake Crabtree County Park in Morrisville. The trail Bryan had cut his teeth on in Chapel Hill was "bootleg" -- a trail cleared by enthusiasts on private land with (or sometimes without) the tacit approval of the landowner.

In the mid-1990s, during mountain biking's boom nationwide, bootleg trail was pretty much all local mountain bikers had. The old Morrisville network, Capital Boulevard, Regency Park and Dunn Road were all good places to ride but were short-lived -- gone when landowners decided to build.

Bryan had never volunteered for anything -- "I guess I was never that passionate about anything" -- but he realized that if he was going to ride trail, he would have to build it.

Forging a path

He started attending workdays at Lake Crabtree, where the NC FATS Mountain Bike Club had built the trail and was responsible for maintaining it. He later volunteered at Harris Lake County Park, which opened with trails in 1999.

In 2002, he learned that a few other mountain bikers from the western Triangle -- Brian Williford and Gaynor Collester -- were talking with park planners about building trail at the new Little River Regional Park north of Durham.

A club -- the Durham Orange Mountain Biking Organization, better known by its pachydermic acronym DOMBO -- was formed for the sole purpose of building the trail. In 2004, after a core group of a half-dozen riders had put in 50 or so Saturdays building trail, the park opened with seven miles of single-track.

Next page >

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.