RESISTING REINVENTION
Eric Wahn looks like he’s competing in a World Cup DH race, only on a trail twice as steep. He weaves between old-growth fir and hemlock with statuesque form, slamming his bike into corners with mere flicks of his weight. Where most people’s brakes would be cooked, Wahn isn’t even using his.
My host, fast as he may be, is no racer, though—he’s a 31-year-old professional forester, and this is just how he rides. That’s because his hometown of Nelson, British Columbia, is one of the last places on earth that still holds a raft of this style of riding: steep, deep, technical, and really scary. While mountain biking as a whole has been sanitized over the last decade and smoothed out for smaller bikes, Nelson remains a throwback to the unsanctioned terror of yesteryear.
The hills above the Queen City of the Kootenays are still laced with the work of the sport’s most demented heyday. The picturesque lakeside town, known for its soft-sided arts and culture, has paradoxically maintained some of the most rugged mountain bike trails in North America. In Canada’s westernmost province, Nelson might just be making DH’s last stand.
Ride to the Hills
When prospectors first found silver on Toad Mountain in the late 1800s, a nearly lawless frenzy of resource extraction ensued. Fortune-seeking miners then built a townsite right on the steep hill wedged against the shore of Kootenay Lake. In 1897, that town was incorporated as the City of Nelson, with Victorian-style granite buildings becoming its longstanding marquee. By the early 1900s, dissident Russian Doukobors (an agrarian Christian sect) began tilling the nearby
