Trails

Cultural Difference #2: Trails

Oh, where to begin?

I'm a trail guy. Grew up on Minnesota's Iron Range riding my BMX bike on mining roads all over tarnation.

At once scary, due to the lack of formal navigation or mapping of any sort, the defunct mining roads of the Parkville/Mountain Iron area, blocked off at all entry and exit locations by "block-offs"--huge piles of dirt detering automobile traffic (deterring, being the operative word, not eliminating) from entering--became for me a place where I developed instinctual navigation in a relatively safe environment in which to learn to roam. Only later in life do I realize how those mining roads developed my sense of direction perhaps to a level not common then, nor now.

The red-soiled mining roads were safe from traffic, which is kind of the point of human-use trails in the first place. They diverted and rejoined and exited in what at first were surprising ways that later became predictable. Familiar. The mining roads around my home became my "domain" as I grew up, started training to be a runner and ski racer, and needed a nearly unending string of off-road places to spread out and cover distance. While "the Range" didn't have an infrastructure motive in the 1970s for trails, 70 years of mining had essentially given us "trails" by default, and along with it, a sock-cleaning nightmare for a young kid's mom trying to keep her bike-exploring kid's cotton tube socks white.

These weren't necessarily pretty trails, mind you. But really, they WERE amazing. They piled up as the aftermath of blown-up earth, after explosives removed them from the places these fragments laid for eons in their natural state, to uncover precious metals below . It's amazing to consider the miles of bike and foot travel I did as a kid and teenager on ground that was put there essentially by man and machine. Nearly all of it.

So, with that as my genesis of trail use, you can imagine the joy I had as a 14-year-old when Giants Ridge was reconceptualized into a major Nordic ski racing center in 1985. The trails designed by Al Merrill, former Dartmouth ski team coach and designer of the 1980 trails in Lake Placid, became my new home as I hit high school. Those trails literally opened doors for me that have made me who I am today. They were magical.

I've realized over the last month that Finland is very very rich in trails, at least by comparison to where I grew up and places I've lived across the United States. You might say, "wait a minute! Duluth is an IMBA Gold Center!" Or, "Salt Lake City, Lake Placid, and the Burlington areas are loaded with trail," and that is true. Jyvaskyla cannot hold a candle to the mountain biking in Duluth, but the volume of trail here across all use, is absolutely astounding.

I recently was lent a great, Cube XC mountain bike from a friend here. At first I was kind of bummed at the head tube angle, thinking this will take some getting re-used to. After a couple days of riding, I realize it is the perfect tool. More on that below...

I certainly have MORE trails to bike here than in Duluth, that's not even up for debate. The difference is, Finland's trail culture is rich in other uses. In fact, they have so much trail already, to even suggest they build new flow trail seems ridiculous, even though they could use some. The trail I'm riding is pretty much either class 2 road-like ski trail that you can easily drive a car or heavy equipment on, or rutty, rocky, super-challenging, SLOW-going, hyper-technical riding, the kind that those of you riding in the mid-1990s like me remember, when a Breezer Jet Stream was the instrument of choice. Let's just say this is a Scott Kylander-Johnson play ground in a big way! I, on the other hand, am rusty, less fit, and older than my Breezer-riding guard-rail-ascending days. It's not a step up for my enjoyment of modern mountain biking.

Where the magnitude of trail really hits you though, is in the daily human-movement infrastructure that the Finns have come to live with as normal. We live by the lakewalk in Duluth, and it is awesome. Now, think about the lakewalk EVERYWHERE; both sides of every major thoroughfare in all directions, and at every major, potentially-dangerous, human-v.-car intersection, a bike path UNDER the intersection. A tunnel. Lots of them. Everywhere. That is the reality here, and it blows me away daily. I don't worry about my kids' safety on a bike, so we are biking. All. The. Time. I'll (begrudgingly) give up Loki for that! For the time being, at least.

I needed to get a street bike to our apartment from my mother-in-law's flat in Saynatsalo, 10 miles away, a suburb of Jyvaskyla. Despite traveling across essentially 3 different municipalities, at no time during the 10 mile ride, did I ever leave a bike path. That is infrastructure in human movement!

The true realization of how rich in and committed to trails Finland is, came to me while riding at Laajavuori, the local alpine and Nordic center up the hill from us.

I was one of the earliest Duluth XC Ski Club members looking at the financial implications of Grand Avenue Nordic Center in Duluth. For those unfamiliar, it's a 2.5+km trail system with built-in snowmaking infrastructure at the base of Spirit Mountain alpine hill in Duluth. Upon researching, we realized there were two ways to go about snowmaking for XC: blow-and-store or built-in trail system.

Blow-and-store is most common worldwide and accompanies trails already in place. The built-in infrastructure is cost-heavy up front in design and and build-out, but once it is built-in, it is way cheaper to operate.

With blow-and-store, you need the ability to blow snow all winter anyway--the guns, water infrastructure and electricity. Then, snow is blown into a big hole dug into an earthen hillside. Snow is blown into the hole in the winter until it is filled, and as spring comes, it is insulated by sawdust to keep over the summer. You lose anywhere from 10-25% of the snow in melt-off, but when freezing temps return in early November, that snow gets spread out with heavy machinery for 1-2km of early season snow that serves as an infrastructure to guarantee a base for the year.

This is done to greater extents at big world cup venues that need to guarantee snow for multi-million-dollar TV contracts. DXC figured out that this annual operation runs on the cheap side at $175k per annum, but more commonly in the $250k range or above. In other words, not an option for Duluth.

The GANC was a big-up front effort, but operates on about a $60k per annum budget by comparison. The operation has been solvent for its first two pre-Covid years. We realized that the blow-and-store was for governments, municipalities, and sites where massive financial support already exists for Nordic skiing.

Guess what I saw when I arrived at the Laajavuori ski stadium? You guessed it; two massive sawdust piles against the hillside. Considering Laajavuori hosts no major events, those saw dust piles imply a lot about what skiing means to Finland.

When someone is so rich in something, they inevitably will throw away what others less rich would certainly love to have. In Finland that's ski trails.

I went out on the Cube to explore what Laajavuori had to offer. Most of the well-kept, highly travelled, wide trails had aluminum, modern way-finding signs. Then I came up on some older wooden signs that had been neglected, pointing to a single track steep climb that said 7,5k/10k Competition Trail in Finnish. The single track down the middle was a clear sign it was being used to mountain bike. It was about as wide as a competition trail might have been designed for in the late 1980s to early 1990s, but it was overgrown with saplings ranging from 3 to 12 feet high.

It wouldn't be my first choice to ski that trail in the shape I'm in, nor did it make for a great mountain bike trail by modern standards, though the Cube XC bike was still the right tool for the job. But from a ski coach and former racer perspective, that trail was awesome. The climbs were long but really well designed. The transitions were creative and fun, and I could see the technique change-up challenges they created.

The trail delighted me as I envisioned 1996 Chad skiing it in a race. I thought back to skiing at Giants Ridge on those magical trails in the '80s. Riding the bike on these, I marveled at the artwork of whomever designed this overgrown, neglected, forgotten, beauty of a race trail.

The 7,5k/10k competition trail at Laajavuori would be tough on a pair of skis, both up and down, even though I've not skied it. It likely doesn't get the snow it used to, but even when it does, it's clearly too much work to maintain for the amount of interest there might be to ski it anymore. It probably falls short of FIS homologation for contemporary racing. Plus, all the major national racing infrastructure has moved to the trails 6km away in Vaajakoski, where they've held the Finnish Championships several times in recent years.

A pang of sadness came over me as I stopped at the high point amid the saplings, taking in a grand vista over the boreal forest to the northeast where a cloud was looking to roll in and dump cold rain on me. At one time, this high point was where coaches stood hunched over their stop watches, waiting for their skiers to appear, grunting and gasping as they crested this massive climb, yelling at them in staccato mouthfuls of overly-lengthy Finnish-language numbers, how they were doing in the race. I could see it. I could here it. I could feel it. If we had this trail in Duluth, it would be a legendary trail.

In Finland, so rich in ski trails, they essentially threw it away. At least they recycle. But that's another topic.