Howell at the Moon Productions

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Pedal Driven : A Bike-umentary from Howell at the Moon
Words by Adrienne Schofhauser
Photo Credit: Bob Allen

The sun is glaring down through the big, open skies and the fresh air is drifting in cool sweeps. It’s a classic spring day in the mountains around Leavenworth, Washington.

Oly Mingo is bumping along in a Toyota pickup with local freerider buddies, Rex Flake, Dustin Spencer and Brad Yaple. They shuttle a logging road, winding up the mountainside past dry brush, then dandelion-punctuated grasses and then on up into the ponderosa pine. They’re headed for a downhill trail that the three riders have been constructing over the past few years. At what looks to be an arbitrary location, Yaple pulls over.

“They start getting the bikes out of the truck and I’m like where are we going?” , says Mingo. They indicate that the trailhead’s right over there. Still, he sees not the slightest bit of disturbance to the surrounding flora. Once geared up, the four push their bikes as delicately as possible through a giant bush.“On the other side, there’s just this trail that emerges,” says Mingo, still intrigued. “It was amazing. They had tool caches up there. And then any time we came back even remotely close to the road, the trail really just disappeared.”
The reason for such covertness is that this trail and certain others carved down on the mountains above Leavenworth are illegal and their builders can go to jail if caught by the forest service. Constructing stunts or shredding the dry single track is strictly forbidden. Or, as Mingo puts it, “I was like dude, this is so cool; it’s all illegal and shit!” He then explains, “And that started the whole romance of it all.”
That “romance” is now in the final stages of production for a research-intensive documentary for which Mingo is the Director of Photography. He works for Howell at the Moon Productions, a commercial and documentary film studio based in Wenatchee, Wash.  It is wrapping up production on Pedal-Driven: a bike-umentary. The film explores the age-old conflict between mountain bikers out building illegal freeride trails and the land-management authority, who tear them out and enforce punishment on the renegades.
“These guys have been riding illegal trails in Leavenworth for eight to 10 years, but the conflict began flaring up about 5 years ago,” says Jamie Howell, Pedal-Driven’s producer. “They were building unsanctioned trails, the forest service was tearing them down, and the riders were rebuilding them. There was just this cycle of tension going on.”
As any rider over the age of 15 will tell you, it’s not an isolated conflict. It’s a battle being fought throughout the freeride mtb community far beyond this tiny town in Central Washington. Howell cites Marin County, California, one of the first places that mountain biking became proliferate. “They’re fighting over whether mountain bikes should even be allowed,” he says. In Montana, mountain bikers recently suffered a major loss of 150 of the 170 available miles of backcountry trails in a Wilderness Study Area. A lawsuit against the Forest Service lumped the disturbance created by mountain bikers in with that of motorcycles. It claims that by allowing mtb access, the USFS is not preserving the “wilderness character” of the area.
Howell at the Moon hopes to use the documentary-style Pedal-Driven to get others thinking about these issues as well as about possible solutions. “The question we’re asking is not, “Should mountain biking be allowed?”, says Howell. “It is instead, ‘”How do we approach these types of things in a cooperative way, and more importantly, in a sustainable way?” Pedal-Driven, thus, goes beyond exploring the relationships between these human factions and considers the mountain bikers’ evolving connection to the environment.
“It’s easy to understand the concept that these are our public lands and we should be able to ride through them and play in them,” says Howell. “That’s really what these guys were doing— getting out and finding a place to play.” But, he says, “You can also see the other side, the forest service side that, well, you just can’t have everybody run roughshod with no regulations.”
“We found scientists and fathers and mothers, community members, shop owners, doctors, lawyers—all professions,” says Howell. “These are highly intelligent, committed, involved individuals,” not some renegade group.
Rex Flake, for example, is a geo-physicist and passionate mountain biker. When not riding or researching, he writes papers to the forest service trying to convince them of the positive impacts that mountain biking can have on a community.
Then there is James Munly who owns a local shop in Leavenworth. He has a pump track and dirt jumps in his backyard and hosts Sunday events for children. The group helps maintain the jumps, then they throw a BBQ.
With Leavenworth’s nine inches annual rainfall and scenic evergreen valley, where the tallest peaks are still snow-capped in late spring, it’s an ideal freeride location. Here, you soak up the beauty and freedom afforded by a six- or eight-inch bike hucking and hauling over huge rock roll-ins, steeps faces and man-made stunts.
“These riders are basically masters of their craft and it’s my job to go up there and try to capture that for them and capture it not only in a way that looks good, but that communicates what the rider’s feeling,” says Mingo. Unfortunately, the forest service — required by law to sanction only trails that they’ve assessed for environmental impact, and can then monitor—haven’t caught that inspiration.
So it’s up to the riders to navigate the slow and convoluted federal system if they want sanctioned trails on this public land. “You go into the forest service and it’s hard to find your way through,” says Howell, who himself had to obtain permits to shoot for Pedal-Driven on forest service land. “It’s a lot easier to go out and put a shovel in the ground, than it is to go to a meeting and fill out the forms. And even when you do that, it can be incredibly expensive and take up to a decade given all the environmental assessments that they have to make.”
The answer, he says, lies in communication and cooperation on the part of both sides to come to an understanding of objectives—and then finding common ground. Fortunately, stories of success are strewn throughout the Northwest. Pedal-Driven went out to find them.

***
Far below the tree canopy, atop a wooden bridge, Billy Lewis is about to drop into the DWB slopestyle line at Duthie Hill, located on the Issaquah Plateau just 15 minutes outside of Seattle. Placed toward the end of the line, Mingo’s camera is rolling.
“Rider!” Lewis calls and plunges into the trail, his cassette hub clattering along the soft dirt and his knobby tires gripping into each perfectly manicured berm. At the last jump, with the late afternoon sun casting a warm glow on the huge double, he throws a smooth and graceful invert, folding the bike up parallel to his body, before landing solid. Mingo is stoked on the shot.
Only officially open since May, 2010, Duthie Hill Mountain Bike Park is already a model of a success in terms of mountain bikers and land-management authority working together. Because of the activism by the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance and its army of volunteers, King County, owner the surrounding park, dedicated funding to the building of sanctioned freeride and cross country trails.
“Here you have groups of mountain bikers who were building those kinds of unsanctioned trails in the dark of night and in bad conditions,” says Howell. “So to allow them to come over to a sanctioned bike park like Duthie and invest that time and energy in a trail that’s going to stay put, that’s going to be taken care of, and that the community, in this case, King County, is committed to protecting—now that’s a whole different scene.”
Another success story is Oakridge, Ore. There, mountain bikers are “unbelievably committed,” says Howell, “and passionate to the extent that a lot of them consider trail maintenance a part of their riding. That’s an incredible resource for the forest service, which can often be under-manned.”
The local forest service realized what a great resource the environmentally-conscious trail builders are. Now, not only do they have sanctioned freeride trails, but federal money has been committed to advancing trail building initiatives.
The effort by mountain bikers to be environmentally conscious—one of the biggest concerns of the forest service—has contributed to these alliances. “Mountain bikers are taking on this idea of more land stewardship and sustainable trail building as a way of cooperative interaction with the forest service,” says Howell.
IMBA is sponsoring Pedal-Driven, as are Specialized and Shimano. “IMBA has an entire textbook that they put out about this stuff,” Howell says, regarding sustainable trail building techniques. “IMBA was the first organization to actually get in place an MOU—a memorandum of understanding—with the U.S. Forest Service. It’s an agreement to say ‘Yes, we [the forest service] acknowledge mountain biking use and we will work together to try to find ways to make it happen.’”
Advocacy for sustainable mountain bike practices is becoming top priority to the core community. It’s a way to ensure the recreation’s vitality. IMBA believes it has “inspired, trained and organized one of the most committed volunteer trail corps in this nation’s history.”
In 2002, the Interior of Bureau of Land Management in D.C. published the National Mountain Bicycling Strategic Action Plan to provide guidance “for implementing on-the-ground actions and resource protection measures for mountain bicycle use…” Even then, they were realizing, “Land managers are now challenged with millions of mountain bicyclists and advanced technologies that enable riders to more easily reach remote areas.”
The trick now is to translate those initiatives in places like Leavenworth, where freeride trail building is still considered a rogue art form.
“I’d definitely say the renegade spirit is alive,” says Howell. “I would not say that it has simmered. But I think that there is a little bit of wisdom stepping in.”
And what about the riding in this film?  “Don’t worry”, says Howell, “We’re still given a dose of the good ole traditional bike porn.”