03
M O U N TA I N B I K I N G
JUAN ALBERTO DEL AROC A A bike lover breathes new life back into a boom-and-bust coal town. It’s hard to imagine a better region than Colorado’s Front Range for any cyclist to cut his or her teeth. The cycling communities there are deeper than anywhere in the country, maybe the world. So after 11 years in Denver and 8 years in Boulder, cyclist/ entrepreneur Juan Alberto DelaRoca had a good idea about what he wanted in a place to live, “All those years taught me that I would have to be somewhere pretty cyclist-friendly, just as a lifestyle requirement for myself.”
D e l a R o c a ’s p a r e n t s m o v e d f r o m Guatemala to the States in the ’60s, and he grew up outside of Washington, D.C., before moving west. In the time since, he’s witnessed the evolution of cycling, mountain biking in particular, and how it can transform a community. “In the early 2000s, skateboarding was the real DIY scene. Skaters pushed the limits with what they had, like at Burnside Skatepark in Portland, Oregon. That’s a bit what it feels like right now in mountain biking. People are realizing they have the chance to shape their own place.” He cites a list of towns—Traverse City, Michigan; Cable City, Wisconsin; Red Cloud, Minnesota; Black Hills, South Dakota— that are recreating themselves, often in the economic wake of their industrial histories. “The trail networks we see in these places now grew out of the fact that people just went and figured out how to do it.” Undeniably beautiful, Trinidad, Colorado, was founded in 1862 on the Purgatoire River at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, 13 miles from the border of New
Mexico. It served as a camp for traders along the Santa Fe Trail that connected Missouri and Santa Fe. The arrival of railways then helped spur Trinidad’s development as a coal center until 1900, but then the mines closed, and people drained steadily out of the town. There were brief periods of fame in the 1960s as Sex Change Capital of the World and as home to Drop City, America’s first recognized hippie commune, but the town of Trinidad was in serious decline. Then came Colorado’s legalization of cannabis in 2014, and tax revenues created a windfall for Trinidad, which had been struggling to address basic infrastructure problems. Pulled back from the brink, the town today is changing. Things are happening (slowly) and entrepreneurial spirits like DelaRoca are helping seed the idea that investment in other economic opportunities, like outdoor recreation, is an essential move. “ When I firs t considered coming to Trinidad, I thought, well, it’s not exactly known for its singletrack,” he laughs. “But I did some research, and I knew the state
BY DIANE FRENCH
“Little wins” keep Berto fine-tuning his vision for Trinidad’s fledgling mountain bike community. Tim Davis
