RALLY
IN THE
VALLEY
By Sue Haywood
Riders relax after a group ride at Pendleton Point in Blackwater Falls State Park.
or the last ten years, the Canaan MTB Festival hasn’t strived to be the biggest or most commercial mountain bike festival in West Virginia. You won’t be able to demo a $10,000 carbon fiber bike. We don’t give out a plastic swag bag filled with corporate advertisements. There are no lines to wait in. We do things our own way. We’re here to welcome you with smile, hug, and a fist bump, and then show you a home-grown good time on two wheels.
the East Coast. It was a homey affair yet had lots of wild and wonderful going on.
The Canaan MTB Festival is a grassroots celebration of our Tucker County mountain community through the prism of the mountain bike. Ultimately, the festival celebrates our area’s trails, which are the veins that deliver the lifeblood of an outdoor community.
INSPIRING REVOLUTIONS The Canaan MTB Festival was inspired by two renowned mountain bike festivals in the Virginias. During the late 80s and until the late 90s the Slatyfork Fat Tire Festival at Elk River Touring Center reigned supreme. I went in 1996 and rode the deep, dark woods of Gauley Mountain with folks from all over
My other inspiration was the Shenandoah Mountain Bike Festival held in the aptly named town of Stokesville, VA at the Stokesville Campground. It started in 1997 and is still a volunteer-run affair with a strong emphasis on trail work, group meals, and a legendary nightlife that included a beer crit and night slalom course on slippery grass. The festival has since matured and now raises thousands of dollars for the Shenandoah Valley Bicycle Coalition. I attended last year and was blown away by the strong attendance, including kids of all ages all riding their bikes non-stop around the campground trails.
DEEP ROOTS The Canaan MTB Festival is a tip of the hat to the deep roots of the Davis mountain bike racing from the 80s— including the infamous Blackwater 100 motorcycle race from the 70s. Canaan Valley was the epicenter of racing over gnarly, muddy terrain. National races were held where thousands of hardy riders tested their mettle among rocks
10 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS SPRING 2019
Building off the template of other festivals with the tools of our rich racing heritage, the driving motivation for me to start the Canaan MTB Festival in 2009 was to give back to the area that has contributed so much to my life. The terrain here can have a beautiful brutality to it. It’s gorgeous yet can be unforgiving on body and equipment. It’s this terrain that forged my career as a professional racer, where I went on to win National and Continental Championships and even a World Title. I wouldn’t have been successful as a professional racer without my mental spitfire being forged in the bogs of Moon Rocks or my technical skills being honed on the brutal terrain of Plantation Trail. If you can ride well in Canaan, you can ride well anywhere. I wasn’t born in West Virginia, but I my love of mountain biking—and the outdoors—was born here in the Mountain State.
"If you can ride well in Canaan, you can ride well anywhere."
Dylan Jones
F
and bogs. If the land could talk, it would tell stories of curses and tears, of lost shoes and busted gears.
