After the excitement of Canada, we got to ease back into work mode by spending some time telecommuting from the ranch and doing some office tasks in Austin. Then we took our last trip in the silver Baja out to Comfort to work at Flat Rock Ranch with Jimmy Dreiss and some of the San Antonio folks from STORM (South Texas Off Road Mountain bikers). Jimmy and his wife Terry hosted a volunteer appreciation weekend complete with free camping and a barbecue dinner for all of the folks who have worked on their trails over the past year. We rode some new sections of trail that had been built recently, and scouted potential spots for some other new trail to be built in the future. We also worked with the STORM folks to plan a reroute for the ICU section of the racecourse; it’s aptly named, as it claimed about 5 broken collarbones in the last race. The new reroute will still be challenging with several rocky ledge drop-offs, it just won’t be so difficult that it’s dangerous to ride down.

The following week we drove up to Dallas to pick up our new Subaru at the Huffine’s dealership. This also happened to be Ryan’s 30th birthday (September 10th) and he was excited, as he’d never received a new car on his birthday before! The new Baja is bright yellow and definitely an eye-catcher, which is good because it gives our program even more visibility at the various venues we go to. Many thanks to the good folks at Subaru of America for continuing to support the Trail Doctors and allowing us to continue our numerous travels.

That night we did a presentation on our program to the Dallas Sierra Club that went quite well. We had expected to get hit with some hard questions since the Sierra Club is traditionally composed of hikers who don’t like to see “those darned mountain bikers” out on the trails. However, the audience was very supportive and asked some good questions without a trace of hostility to be found. The only difficult part was being second on the schedule after the presenters from the Dallas Zoo. We couldn’t hold a candle to the interest generated by the animals they brought along, including a great horned owl, an anteater, and a 10-foot long Burmese python!

We finished out the week of September 10-14 at X-Bar Ranch in El Dorado, where the 2nd race of the TMBRA Fall series was held. We got to set up our TBC booth next to our new Subie with the traveling ‘Share the Road’ license plate display and voting boxes so we could debut the plate designs with the mountain biking folks. We got some good responses and the race weekend was going well until the rains came in about 6am Sunday morning. Poor Stan Meador (ranch owner and race promoter) got hit with bad weather for the second year in a row. As he said ruefully later that day, “I live in the desert—what are the chances of it raining two years in a row?” Better luck in ’04 Stan!

Since Ryan got to work on his birthday in Dallas, it was only fair that Susan got to work on her birthday too, which was on September 16th. We spent that evening in Beaumont at a meeting to help organize the folks interested in creating a rails-to-trails bike path from Beaumont to the beach in Galveston. This came about as a result of the good meetings we had with bike shop owner Eric Bender and Chuck Hunt from the National Park Service back in early July. Kathryn Nichols from NPS also attended the meeting to lend her expertise in educating community members about resources available to them to keep the project moving forward. We look forward to attending the next meeting in October to continue working on this exciting venture.

The rest of that week was spent in Houston visiting some more bike shops that we ran out of time to visit when we last swung through town. We had productive meetings with the owners of some new and smaller shops in town, and talked about the various programs of the Texas Bicycle Coalition that might be of interest to them. We also stayed with TBC board member Christina Case, who is a personal friend of ours, and went for a ride around town with the group from West End Bicycles in the Memorial Park area. Speaking of Memorial Park, we met with Rick DeWees and the trail steward one evening and spoke about possible future re-routes to deal with a user safety issue that recently came up.

After our 2 days off we headed back towards San Antonio and stayed with “King Mojo” Alan Sansome before going out to Government Canyon State Natural Area to work with the TPWD folks on their evolving trail system. John Banks also from Bike Mojo went with us to show us around and facilitate discussions with the staff. The property will eventually be a state park open to the public, but it’s in the process of being developed with trails and additional infrastructure before it is officially opened. It’s beautiful property, and we know that many outdoors enthusiasts are excited about being able to explore the area when it officially becomes a state park.

Tapatio Springs is another exciting project we got involved in while in that part of the hill country. The property is actually a golf resort in Boerne, which the owner Jay Parker plans to turn into a mountain biking destination as well. The site will also be a race venue for the TMBRA Spring series, so a lot of trail has to be built before March. Mark Trevino has been organizing workdays along with Lisa Nye and Adam Salladin from Hill Country Bicycle Works, and they’ve invited the Trail Docs to get involved as well, which we’re only too happy to do!

We wrapped up September by going to Huntsville State Park for the 3rd TMBRA race. The weather was nice, the trail was in great shape due to some recent re-routes, and we raised some more money for TBC with the license plate display. All in all a good weekend! We’ll start out October by going to Cooper Lake State Park up in north Texas, then down to Lake Bryan for the next race. Send us an email at traildocs@biketexas.org if you’d like to give us any feedback or make a request for a visit in your town!