The Loop of Pain

Fri, 11/01/2024 - 7:20pm

When: 2024

In her documentary short Loop of Pain, filmmaker Jen Proctor takes us on a ride through the history of mountain biking in Ann Arbor and the creation--sometimes unsanctioned--of the collection of trails known as the Local Loop or the Loop of Pain.

Transcript

• [00:00:06] Tracy Berman: It's not super clear about what it includes and what it doesn't include.
• [00:00:11] Dave Borneman: You ask 10 different people what it is, you'll probably get 20 different answers. There's no official parking lot you go to and trail map to follow it.
• [00:00:17] Brian Delaney: People have their different starting places where they like to begin, so there's no formal start to finish.
• [00:00:22] Ty Corle: You can't just, like, go to a trailhead like you would for a normal mountain bike trail. You have to connect little pieces of trail that are on different sides of town.
• [00:00:30] Brian Delaney: Ann Arbor is known for its series of parks and nature areas. What the local loop does is it connects the trails within each of those parks, and then there's connector trails between the parks. There are some sections of paved or border-to-border trail that connect these parks, but it's a mountain bike system or a trail running system through Ann Arbor that starts about a mile from downtown.
• [00:01:08] Tracy Berman: I usually like to start in the Bluffs, and then you can go to Kuebler Langford.
• [00:01:13] Ty Corle: Then ride through Barton Nature area.
• [00:01:14] Norm Roller: Crossed over under M14, and that goes from Whitmore Lake Road all the way through Pontiac Trail.
• [00:01:21] Jason Aric Jones: If you're at Pontiac Trail, there's a crossing of the trail right there that you cross from the greenway. When you get to the end of that, you can either go right or left. If you go right, it takes you into Black Pond Wood. If you go left, and there's the little bridge that you cross and then you climb up to the soccer field and toboggan hill that used to be tennis courts, now pickleball courts. It's a way to take you all the way up to Olson Park.
• [00:01:48] Jason Aric Jones: Tuebingen plays a great part because there is a mixed-use trail that goes through there, and then from there, you have to do an odd connection to go around the golf course to get to Leslie Woods. Southeast is Stapp Nature area. That, of course, is city land, so that's connected.
• [00:02:01] Dave Borneman: We went to Island Park and ascended a hill from Island Park to Cedar Bend. There was one notorious hill called Hee-Haw, and it was a long steep uphill there off of Cedar Bend.
• [00:02:16] Norm Roller: If you can ride up that, you're in pretty good shape. The trail goes down to the Fuller Field. That's about where the loop goes back into town.
• [00:02:29] Meg Delaney: Finding a mountain bike and getting on, it was an immediate connection to the best part of being a seven-year-old. There was just some kind of freedom and connection that was primal. I had some friends in the mid-80s who were mountain biking on three-speed Schwinns. Way before there was such a thing as a mountain bike, and they would come back just bruised and bloody with broken bikes and these grins on their faces.
• [00:03:07] Norm Roller: Fundamentally, you're going out for a ride in the countryside. You want to ride in some greenery, and you want to hear a bird sing, and you want to not think you're in a downtown area. You want to think you're out in the country having fun. That's where you get rejuvenated.
• [00:03:20] Bill Mayer: Back in college, I managed a bike shop called Great Lakes Cycling. I was privy to seeing the bicycle industry realize there's this new category of bike. It was this land rush of all of these new bikes became available, and they sold like crazy.
• [00:03:39] Jason Aric Jones: Sure enough at a certain point there, in the '90s or whatnot, It more just gravitated all towards mountain bikes, but people needed places to ride.
• [00:03:49] Bill Mayer: An undisturbed woods is amazing, but it's more challenging to use than a place with a nice trail system that's signed and marked. Some of the early trails that we just glommed onto were things like Bird Hills, Argo Park that goes along the river. The trail was legitimately difficult, and the bikes weren't great. I remember getting my first mountain bike, trying to ride Bird Hills, and it was really hard. But I didn't care because I was in my 20s, and I was going to conquer the world.
• [00:04:22] Jason Aric Jones: I actually ended up working at Cycle Cellar in the mid-90s. Essentially, the shop workers, they wanted to have places to ride. They started riding some of the local loop trails. It was really the shop employees of Great Lakes Cycle and Cycle Cellar who really started doing a lot of this work on the local trails.
• [00:04:44] Norm Roller: The initial "Loop of Pain," it was called, was a road bike route that went up into Barton Hills up in here and looped around and did all those climbs up in there. But mountain bike people started showing up and we started saying, well, we want to do some of that, too. Let's start looking around for trails here and there. We can make this work. Maybe we've got to walk on a pavement for a little ways, but we can jump back on a trail over there. But if you didn't know where it was, you wouldn't know how to get on it or get off it for that matter.
• [00:05:10] Jason Aric Jones: Then over by the hospital, there was one notorious hill called Hee-Haw. Someone coined the phrase the Loop of Pain.
• [00:05:17] Meg Delaney: Some people called it the Loop of Pain. Some people called it the Friday Night Fun Ride. It grew out of Ann Arbor's Cycle Cellar on Felch Street. It was a super fun ride. It was about just under 15 miles and mostly off-road.
• [00:05:42] Brian Delaney: Bird Hills was considered a hiking area and a nature area. They were not at that point, multi-use trails. When bikes started showing up, there was a serious issue, which required a lot of the local mountain bikers to band together in advocacy for their sport. We ended up advocating very early on.
• [00:06:07] Meg Delaney: That's when this group really decided to not only be advocates for the sport but be advocates for the trail and the area itself. We would participate in trail maintenance events. When it was time to look at erosion control measures, we were part of those discussions, been part of those work groups to implement the solutions.
• [00:06:32] Jason Aric Jones: There were certain battleground areas. Bird Hills was one. The city took a hard-line stance that was forbidden to ride bikes.
• [00:06:42] Dave Borneman: I started in November '93. Mountain biking I was, I think, just getting started and had already been an issue. Right away, I got thrown into a newly appointed mountain bike task force. I give a lot of credit to one of the guys in the committee Norm Roller. He was the one that really pointed out that, hikers and bikers. We should both be on the same side here. I thought that was a good message.
• [00:07:02] Norm Roller: Dave Borneman was extremely supportive of bikes at that time. The mountain biking community owes him a real debt of gratitude. I was in a unique position because I was also in the Sierra Club, and it's not often you get bikers and Sierra Club members in the same room. I also was on a mountain bike task force, it was called. We came up with a set of rules. The first thing we said, you should never go into an area and try and change it from what it is. If you got an established community that uses it for this that and other thing, don't fight them cause you're not going to win. Then there was make it safe. Make it sustainable. The last one was make it fun.
• [00:07:40] Dave Borneman: There was a push to ban mountain bikes from Argo, and the mountain biking community said, wait a minute. You just banned us from Bird Hills. We don't want this to start losing all the parks. In exchange for that there was a strip of land that was not officially park land, that the Huron Parkway right of way was what it was officially called that ran from Whitmore Lake all over to connection to Leslie Park Golf Course. In a place like that they very intentionally laid it out with mountain biking needs in mind. They wanted to get from point A to point B. They were really looking to create connections like that.
• [00:08:14] Norm Roller: That connected the two parts of the loop right there, and that was pivotal. The other part of it that's probably most interesting to most people is the development of the Bluffs. That was another area that Dave was very supportive in allowing us to have a single area that we could ride through in there. But there were awful lot of pirate trails at that time, too, and they were causing us a lot of trouble because people would just go in and chop away and leave the brush all over the place. But eventually, we settled down. One of the good things we did is we brought some of these groups together, and after the first few years, the other people weren't quite so big a demons as they were the first few times they confronted each other.
• [00:08:52] Dave Borneman: I will give the mountain bikers a lot of credit. They, as an organization, were really responsible. They taught us a lot about how to maintain trails so that they didn't necessarily erode. I think it evolved a be good partnership between the city parks and the local mountain bike groups.
• [00:09:07] Norm Roller: That increase in the knowledge of the trail builders pays off huge dividends and the durability and the survivability and the longevity of the trails.
• [00:09:20] Bill Mayer: Olson Park is named after Ron Olson. It was a really nice homage to our former director of Parks and Recreation in Ann Arbor, who now leads the effort for the state of Michigan.
• [00:09:31] Meg Delaney: Ron Olson is such a fabulous person. He really made a lot of this happen. His open attitude was everything.
• [00:09:43] Bill Mayer: Olson Park was the gravel pit that they built M14 from. It was basically just a decommissioned gravel pit. We would bike up there also, but it was pretty sketchy.
• [00:09:57] Jason Aric Jones: One of the reasons that I think Ron looked at creating some designated and official mountain bike trail in there is, to give bikers an official space. Chief Olson had approached the Potawatomi Mountain Biking Association. One of the big things is Chief Olson has said, can we work with the local group here to create trails there?
• [00:10:21] Norm Roller: It was a burned out gravel pit, but first rule of building the places nobody else wants it. What we did is we just looped trails around the bumps and piles of gravel and stuff that were out there, and then I sketched out a plan that would tie all these little areas together.
• [00:10:37] Jason Aric Jones: We would go out and according to what we had learned from the International Mountain Biking Association on how to build trails would have work days to build the single track trail.
• [00:10:47] Norm Roller: My job was pretty much to come out there at lunchtime and peck away at it. By the end of the fall, we pretty much had a trail through there, which we could connect to other parts of the loop.
• [00:10:56] Jason Aric Jones: It was really all pretty much, I believe, hand built by Potawatomi Mountain Biking Association and its members and associates.
• [00:11:07] Bill Mayer: We've got the dog people. We've got the soccer players, we've got the people having picnics, we've got the fisher people, and the mountain bikers, all coexisting, having a great time. That park not only was designed properly with the modern trail theory, but came into being once mountain bikes weren't really scary anymore.
• [00:11:28] Norm Roller: There's nothing like the sweat equity you see in some of these older school trails.
• [00:11:39] Garret Potter: A friend, who was a runner had told me "I've seen some dirt jumps back in these woods, you should go try to find it," and they gave me some vague directions about how to get there. I found it, and it was like finding the ruins of an ancient civilization. It was just buried in weeds up to my head. We went out and just began to uncover the ruins. It was just, oh wow, there's more jumps here, there's a turn here.
• [00:12:02] Brian Butrico: Tuebingen was always an off the radar, like bandit trail, but that was the wild west of mountain bike jumping.
• [00:12:09] Travis Plotner: Back then, it wasn't exactly legal, but there's definitely significant figures who a couple of years at a time would be in charge of it.
• [00:12:17] Dave Borneman: Initially, I think the city would say you can't do that. We'd try to shut it down, but then if we didn't keep on it, they would pretty quickly come back and develop it. I think the city just pretended that we didn't know about it.
• [00:12:30] Garret Potter: It was really at its best around 2012 and 2013. This is being a university town. The hard part is you have passionate cyclists come in with a lot of skill and a lot of ability who are here for a year or three or four, and then they leave. Tuebingen saw a large dormant period from 2013 or 2014. We started uncovering things, and almost immediately, we realized that there's trails that aren't accessible because there's huge trees that have fallen. Let's go talk to the staff at the city and find out, can you guys help us with this? When city staff responded so positively, that's when things just started escalating. We started working out there. We really wanted to demonstrate to the city that there was a community around this. We've got a great community of people who are helping out. Well, now, of course, the city has formalized Tuebingen. We have informational kiosks. We have tool sheds stocked with tools that the city has purchased for us. What we have is safe, what we have is legal. We're establishing the beginning of a system whereby from Tuebingen onward, we can add trail signage, mapping, and way finding, which will help lead to the formalization of more and more segments of the loop. Once we have more segments of the loop, then possibly the overall loop. The local loop has not been more formalized because it is a group of segments that are interconnected through private property or otherwise not best practices for safety. Most people just don't even know it's there. They don't know how to get from one place to the other.
• [00:14:13] Tracy Berman: The mystery is fun, but it does make it less accessible to people, and I'd rather see more people out enjoying bikes or running. I also don't necessarily love being a scofflaw, even though I am all the time. Having legitimate ways to connect the portions where we're not going over the railroad tracks, where we're not supposed to be. I would appreciate it if it was a little more legitimate in those sections.
• [00:14:35] Brian Butrico: I think the city has a huge opportunity to work with other stakeholders and land owners to get easements. This is not a new problem, I guess for the mountain bike community.
• [00:14:43] Garret Potter: For me, the priority with the local loop is not the maintenance of the trail itself so much as the initiation of mapping and way finding and trail signage. Once we have the mapping and way finding and trail signage, people are going to want to maintain the trails more and enhance the trails and improve the trails more.
• [00:15:00] Travis Plotner: Now we have kids where they go out and they do trail maintenance, and it's a thing. They make a whole day of that. For me, it's very special to see that. It's going to keep going, and it's going to continue.
• [00:15:08] Norm Roller: Every generation, so to speak, has its own idea what trails should look like. The trail is the trail, but the concept of what you experience when you're out there will differ with time. The trail will still be there, but it won't always be recognized in the same way.
• [00:15:23] Kevin Laroe: People don't realize how many mountain bikers there really are out there. You make mountains out of molehills, because that's all we have here. [MUSIC]