Advocacy
The MTB Egypt community is committed to:
- Promotion and encouragement of mountain biking in Egypt.
- Raising awareness about environmental sustainability and “responsible riding”.
- Engagement of other established or nascent cycling groups.
- Mapping and exploring ridable trail systems.
- Involvement of a broad spectrum of riders.
Trail building and maintenance:
Many of us know that some of the more experienced members of our community put a lot of time and effort in building, maintaining and extending some of the best trails that we ride. Some of you have been kind enough to volunteer their time on a weekend or two to help in such efforts, but as interest in mountain biking in Egypt is growing pretty fast thanks to our wonderful community, one or two weekends every once in a while for trail building/maintenance is no longer adequate.
To this end, you – as a mountain biker – should:
1) Ride responsibly: When riding on singletrack (especially one that has been freshly built), try not to do things that easily destroy the trail. Two of these destructive activities are: ( a ) Riding off-trail, which is sometimes not avoidable, but if you try to ride with more experienced riders if you are not familiar with the trails yet, this will be minimized. ( b ) Pushing a bike up the trail, which leaves deep scars in the soft ground of the trail. If a trail is especially challenging for you, try riding some of the more forgiving trails for a while to build up strength that would lessen the need for you to dismount and push up a trail. There are some things that we have no control over, such as irresponsible 4×4 drivers and MXers who cut up and mangle the trails. Fortunately, most of the good trails are not accessible to these vechicles and we should also take the repsonsibility of rebuilding what they destroy.
2) Because points a & b that are explained in #1 above cannot ALWAYS be avoided, you need to make sure that you commit some of your riding time to help in maintaining trails that are left in bad shape as more people ride them. This is the only way the beautiful, accessible and very diverse area of the wadi will be maintained sustainably for us to enjoy many years from now. We will be posting information soon about scheduled trail maintenance sessions, but I would urge you all to dedicate a bit of time and effort regularly to building and maintaining what YOU ride.
Keep the rubber side down.
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