One recent summery evening, as the sun turns gold and the flies grow more persistent, a bunch of people park their cars in a field in Bolton, and pull out their mountain bikes.
Above this field is a hill covered in tall trees. And winding between those trees is a new trail network called the Driving Range. Tonight, volunteers are putting the final touches on the trails.
For that work, Greg Durso gets on his adaptive mountain bike. It looks like a trike, with three wheels.
“This is a prone-position bike, meaning I kneel, I have my chest on a chest plate, and my hands are out in front of me, so it's more head-first,” he says.
First, Durso makes sure the motor battery pack is secured.
“When it gets kind of like, bumpy or rocky out there, the battery can shift, and you can lose the power, and that’s not very fun,” he says.
Durso throws on his sunglasses — to keep the bugs out of his eyes — before transferring from his wheelchair into the bike seat. He lifts each of his legs into the knee trays and tightens all the straps. Once he pulls on his elbow pads and gloves, and makes sure he has water, he’s ready to go.
He then bikes up the hill, stopping at one curve where several volunteers are whacking the ground with shovels. This has been a particularly wet spot, and now, it’s dried out.
“This is like, pretty impressive actually, I think it should be fine,” Durso tells the volunteers, noting he can take the turn wide and cut his bike to the inside. “I should be good.”
Durso lives in Burlington and works for the Kelly Brush Foundation, which empowers people like him, who have both spinal cord injuries and active lives. He got into mountain biking seven years ago, and says it’s become his favorite thing to do.
“I ride at Cady Hill a lot in Stowe, I think it's really fun there,” Durso says. “Killington also works really, really well. Hinesburg Town Forest, another favorite of mine.”
It was one ride in Hinesburg Town Forest several years ago that, according to Durso, proved a pivot point for adaptive mountain biking in Vermont. Also on that ride was Berne Broudy — she’s the president of the board for the nonprofit Richmond Mountain Trails.
“I was on some really narrow bridges that looked pretty sketchy,” Durso says.
And Broudy says at each of those bridges, the entire group would stop their ride.
“People would get off their bikes, would help Greg across the bridge, which was maybe like, 6 inches too narrow for him to actually just make it on his own,” she says.
And for Durso, he says, “It was like, ‘Hey, like, this is great that this almost works. But like, it wouldn't be that crazy to actually make this work, right?’”
Broudy notes that there are so many problems in the world that we can’t necessarily fix. But, she says, “We can have an impact here. Like we can change this.”
After that ride together, Durso and Broudy, along with a couple hundred volunteers, got to work. With the help of several nonprofits and 256 acres offered up by a Bolton landowner, they did something that’s never been done before in Vermont — and maybe in the country. They built the Driving Range trail network so it was fully accessible to adaptive mountain bikes.
“We don't know how to prove that, but we think it's the first,” Broudy says.
They accomplished this by having Durso do what he’s doing tonight, and test-run every single trail.
“It's an honor for me just to be here and be part of this and build something that like, I know, like, actually has my hands on this,” he says.
Durso says to have people counting on him — it’s something he doesn’t get to feel that often.
“Yeah it’s interesting like, I mean, I hate to get like, so cynical, but it's like, a lot of times you feel like a burden, right? There's these things that you just can't do, or like, it's hard,” he says. “And I think you, you hide some of those feelings away.”
But this dynamic is flipped at the Driving Range.
“Greg is the most critical volunteer probably to this project,” Broudy says. “Because every time we build something, like Greg rides it, gives us feedback, we fix it right away, he rides it again, and then we move on to the next spot. Like that is how we built this network.”
And now that this network exists, Durso says it’s freeing to know he can show up here and access everything no problem.
“Parking structure, handicap spots, there's a bathroom, like, right? It's all level and like, all those things like, easy, I can get there,” he says. “And then I get on trail and all the trails I know work based upon your skill level.”
To be clear, the trails at the Driving Range — they’re universally accessible to all mountain bikers. But they aren’t … easy. I watch Durso fly down an incredibly steep hill. Then a few minutes later, he goes careening around a corner underneath a jump, where a series of younger bikers launch themselves a dozen feet in the air.
“People think of adaptive mountain biking, and they think it’s, they think ADA first, and it's kind of the exact opposite of what we're doing,” Durso says. “This is mountain biking, we still want the trails to be hard.”
It’s mountain biking, and even more importantly for Durso, he says the Driving Range creates community. Once he finishes riding tonight, he joins the crowd gathering by the trailhead for a barbecue, where more prospective mountain bikers discuss what kind of adaptive equipment they might like to try.
“The bike riding is great, but this place transcends the riding, right? It becomes this identity or vibe, or whatever it is to you. And it's bringing so many adaptive people together to have that. And that's just so hard to actually articulate and provide,” Durso says. “But it gives that sense of normalcy back to people that don't know what that feeling is anymore.”
To have a place — a home — for adaptive riders to go at any time, he says, is really game changing.
And more adaptive-friendly mountain biking is coming online across the state. The Vermont Mountain Bike Association, in partnership with the Kelly Brush Foundation and Vermont Adaptive Ski and Sport, have identified and improved nearly 90 miles of trails that are accessible to adaptive riders.
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