Chain gang

I’m peering over my handlebars down the precipitous southwest flank of Idaho Peak at one of B.C.’s raw resources. Wind ripples the surface of Slocan Lake far below, and the granite ramparts of the Valhalla Range beyond form spiky silhouettes in the late afternoon sun.

I ponder the steep, twisting descent of Wakefield Trail that lies ahead. It’s as though somebody had demarcated the trail by simply painting an arbitrary line on a map irrespective of the mountain’s topography. Just the thought of falling off the edge of this skinny strip of dirt is enough to make the palms clammy.

The raw resource I’m talking about isn’t the type we dig from the ground or the sort we harvest into logs for the lumber mill. Rather, it’s the kind on which we pedal our bikes, scare ourselves silly like oversized children, and get our hearts pumping like James Brown midway through an extended version of “Sex Machine.”

Slideshow: Biking the Southern Chilcotins

It’s the natural, rugged terrain essential for mountain biking, and B.C., with its diverse topography and dedicated riding community that has turned trail-building into an art, is a veritable gold mine of opportunities for this adventure sport.

Though mountain biking wasn’t invented in B.C. – its roots can be traced back to the late 1970s and early ’80s in Marin County, California – it’s safe to say that the sport shed its pimply adolescent face and truly came of age here in its various incarnations of cross country, lift-accessed downhill and free-riding.

“North Shore” is no longer just the name of a Vancouver suburb; the term has evolved into an adjective employed by magazines from around the globe to describe a trickster’s style of mountain biking that involves steep descents loaded with man-made structures – a genre of riding that was pioneered on the slopes of Cypress, Seymour and Fromme, near Grouse.

Now that B.C. has a well-established cachet and credentials in the global mountain-biking community, its aficionados here at home want a little more respect from the powers that be. And it seems, with the provincial government developing new policy around riding and building trails on Crown land, mountain bikers may indeed be close to truly shedding their status as the unwanted

So last summer, when I received the invite from Mike Brcic, owner of Fernie-based Sacred Rides Mountain Bike Holidays Ltd., to join him and a handful of other riders on a 12-day odyssey across the province, it took me all of about two seconds to reply. Somehow I would find a way to pencil this adventure into my day planner.

Up until now, my idea of a mountain-bike road trip invariably involved sleeping in vans, usually with other sweaty males, and surviving on rations of canned beans and cheap beer. Brcic’s trip was to be a prototype of a tour he planned to offer his clients: hard riding by day, fine dining and luxury accommodation by night. It was also an opportu­nity to take the pulse of this exciting, adrenaline-charged pursuit and meet some of the players who are working hard to carve out a more prominent niche for mountain biking in the province’s tourism spectrum.

Day six of the tour had brought us here to the Wakefield Trail in the heart of the Kootenays – an old miners’ path turned Kootenay biking classic. I was quickly realizing that Brcic knows how to have fun on a bike. Since starting Sacred Rides on a shoestring back in 1997, the 36-year-old entrepreneur has expanded his repertoire of tours beyond B.C. to include exotic forays into Chile and Peru.

However, Brcic is inevitably drawn back to the mountain-biking nirvana of B.C., and the fact he’s planning on offering such a posh mountain-biking experience suggests the sport’s disciples have pedalled a long way in terms of buying power. (One of these 11-day luxury tours would set you back $3,995.) Yet Brcic and others involved in selling mountain biking believe the province could do a lot more to capitalize on its off-road riding resources.