INTERNATIONAL ADVENTURE

The best mountain bike town you’ve never heard of.

WORDS TIM NEWCOMB PHOTOGRAPHY VARIOUS

Photos thanks to the good bike folks of Bellingham.

Bellingham, Washington, loves to party in the woods. Everyone’s invited to join. Many do.

The growing mountain biking community in the northwest corner of the United States, midway between Seattle, Washington, and Vancouver in Canada, along the Salish Sea coast has become an attractive draw for mountain bikers seeking a singular community culture that mixes hundreds of miles of on-mountain trails from cross-country to freeride downhill. Merge a lively brewery scene and a city of 90,000 that embraces mountain bikers with a cultural and political landscape which encourages trail building and Bellingham has drawn the likes of Kona, Transition and Evil. It may be the community that invites mountain bikers to Bellingham, but credit the loam-laden trails with keeping them. And it could all add up to the best mountain biking available in the United States.

“I’ve travelled all over the planet mountain biking and not seen many towns like Bellingham,” says Kevin Menard, Transition co-owner. “The level of support here for trail building is unrivalled. It is a small enough town you can feel more connected, but big enough you can pool resources and do some rad stuff as a community.”

Wall ride, anyone?

Let’s ride

Bellingham IS mountain biking. The 5pm rush hour sends mountain bikers from downtown up Birch Street toward the north entrance to Galbraith Mountain, a 65-mileplus privately owned logging mountain that has a unique agreement to keep mountain biking-specific trails going in perpetuity. But that isn’t all. Chuckanut Mountain, just a skosh closer to the waterfront, offers some of the oldest trails in the area – and the most natural – and the scene continues to grow, east to Lookout Mountain, downtown to pump tracks and throughout surrounding Whatcom County communities.

For more info, see Visit Bellingham at bellingham.org It’s just as well the mountains are pretty.

Get to know Bellingham

Part college town – Western Washington University is the third largest in the state and alma mater of Kyle Young, Transition co-owner – part old industrial logging town and part outdoor sports mecca soaked in craft beer and coffee, Bellingham sits in the coastal hills off Interstate 5 aside the bay about 90 miles north of Seattle and 50 miles south of Vancouver. For mountain bikers keeping score, that’s less than 60 miles south of Vancouver’s North Shore, 90 miles from Squamish and 130 miles south of Whistler.

The mix of history and youth means mountain biking culture permeates every walk of life. Perhaps most important, though, is the incredible level of support for mountain biking from unique partnerships between the volunteer-backed Whatcom Mountain Biking Coalition (WMBC), the main stewards of the trails in Bellingham and Whatcom County, government land management agencies and even private landowners, such as the entity that owns the logging rights on Galbraith Mountain. These partnerships ensure that mountain bikers have access to forested land between the water and Mount Baker, a 10,700ft-tall peak just 60 miles east in Whatcom County, which makes skiing, biking and paddling all part of a single day in the far reaches of the Pacific Northwest, but also that trails are maintained. And built. And built some more. “Other places you can’t build trails and can’t even do maintenance,” Transition’s Menard says. “We have a different mindset. Our mountains are great little canvases to build stuff. The trail-building level is extremely high, people don’t build crap here, it’s really high-quality stuff. Stuff you’d pay a professional crew for and that’s always been the culture.” An average trail workday can bring more than 80 volunteers, all folks riding to the mountain from home or pulling up in their tailgate-padded pickups.