LINES IN THE DIRT

PART ONE

WHERE TRADITION MEETS PROGRESS NORTHERN CALIFORNIAÕS POLARIZING PROBLEM

MOUNTAIN BIKING IS NOT

A CRIME. So says the sticker on Davey Simon’s rear bumper, anyway.

It’s a postcard October afternoon on the Northern California coast. Simon emerges from the small cottage where he lives in Point Reyes Station and walks around to a shed in the backyard. He is building up a bike and a new fork has arrived. He doesn’t try to hide his glee, even if few of his neighbors can relate to it.

With 125 miles of world-class trails just down the street from his home, Simon’s options for a test ride might seem to be endless. Except most are off limits to Simon and anyone else riding a bike. That’s because they are located within Point Reyes National Seashore, one of the country’s most popular national parks and a crown jewel among Marin County’s natural splendors— as well as home to the Phillip Burton Wilderness. Simon has time for a quick happy-hour ride after spending the day with his 7-month-old son, Miles, and plans to pedal out and back on the Bear Valley trail, a smooth, flat, 15-foot-wide thoroughfare posing as singletrack on maps.

Simon, 38, is well built and balding, with a thick brown beard that frames his frequent grins. He has lived in Marin almost all his life, first in Corte Madera, then in Novato, and now on the county’s western edge surrounded by rolling hills and the Pacific Ocean. Considering that Marin is widely regarded as the birthplace of mountain biking yet affords some of the worst mountain-bike access in the world, it is probably not an accident that Simon sits on the board of directors for the Sustainable Trails Coalition (STC), a hardline mountain-bike advocacy group that is trying to overturn the nationwide ban on bikes in Wilderness.

Simon has identified himself on the popular mountain-biking forum MTBR.com as an “outspoken hothead,” but in person he comes across as rational, albeit impassioned. “One of the most frustrating things for me as a volunteer cycling advocate,” he says, “is hearing from people across the nation that there’s no reason to ride in the 2 percent of land mass that’s designated Wilderness. For me, that’s a third of the bike-legal trails in the county— 125 miles of trails—so it’s significant.”

Simon pedals along in a hooded sweatshirt, pointing out what he deems irrational closures along the way. At one junction, two small signs are in danger of being consumed by bushes. At another, a sign declares, “No wheeled vehicles” alongside a highly trafficked road and the Rift Zone singletrack.