ASS Does Downieville: Documenting season of work & play
For the next six months, this will be my chariot, hauling fat tire fanatics to the top of Packer Saddle.
Hi folks. It’s been a few months. There’s no real excuse for my absence, it’s just the way life goes sometimes. Unlike some columnists, if I don’t have anything worthwhile to share, I don’t waste my readers’ time. [Editor’s Note: That’s debatable…]
But for the next six months or so, I’ll have plenty of interesting things to share. Why? Because I recently struck up an agreement with the folks at the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship and Yuba Expeditions to document on Mtbr a summer working part-time in my favorite place to escape reality, Downieville, California.
So much history in Downieville. Cool old buildings everywhere.
If you’ve never been to Downieville then you might ask what could possibly be so interesting about documenting a summer working at a bike shop and driving a shuttle van in some backwater mountain town. But those who’ve been here and the surrounding Gold Lakes region understand. It’s a special place, a Sierra Nevada gold fever mountain town trapped in time, where descendants of the original ’49er prospectors still live, and tales of people finding gold still happen. A town that nearly became California’s state capitol. A town notorious for the first public hanging of a woman in the state. A town where gallows still sit next to the county courthouse. A town where cell phones don’t work. A town where bears outnumber humans. A town where rush hour is running to the corner store for a six-pack before it closes.
A sleepy and quiet Downieville main street in late March.
There’s no shortage of great riding in Downieville, and there’s no shortage of bizarre stories either. Known by many as a “drinking town with a mountain biking problem,” whether it’s a harrowing tale of surviving a collision with a bear while riding Third Divide, or an outrageous account of a local drunkard diving headfirst off the top beam of the town bridge, the tales in Downieville never fail to provide a laugh (and sometimes a grimace). And considering 2015 is the 20th anniversary of the Downieville Classic, the tales this year will be extra superfluous.
It’s these stories, the characters, the history, the riding and the strange dynamic between locals and out-of-town mountain bikers that make the Downieville experience so memorable. And in nearly 25 years of riding mountain bikes all over the country, I still have yet to experience another town quite like Downieville. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to spend a summer here, and this year I’m going to find out.
I’m sure I’ll be getting a lot of time on this over the summer straightening out the abuse Downieville is known for.
I’ll be working three to four days a week at Yuba Expeditions, wrenching on bikes and driving the shuttle back and forth to Packer Saddle. It’s been two decades since I worked at a bike shop, so I’m looking forward to being immersed back into the life of a wrench. But Yuba is more than just a bike shop; it’s the place where people congregate before and after a ride, only a football’s throw from the banks of the Yuba River. It’s where the tales are told and where inevitable hijinks originate.
I’ll also be helping maintain and build trails with the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship (SBTS), a volunteer-driven, non-profit organization founded in 2003 to help improve the local economies of Sierra and Plumas Counties through building and maintaining multi-use trail for recreation. Sierra and Plumas Counties are among the poorest in California, former logging and mining counties that have long been forgotten. SBTS employs as many as 15 local residents full-time to help transform these counties into thriving regions known for world-class recreation.
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