Tales From The Trails: Aaron Clarke on the Art of Bike Park Trail Maintenance
Bike parks don’t build and maintain themselves, and when yours has 5,620 vertical feet of relief, it’s a monumental task. At Revelstoke Mountain Resort, that task belongs to Aaron Clarke, RMR’s head of trail crew. Every single time you shralp a perfectly sculpted berm or sail over a well-shaped lip, you have Aaron and his team to thank. On any given day, they’re rerouting problem sections, adding new features, patching holes, building new trails, or even installing irrigation. The latter is one of Clarke’s personal projects, which has a dual purpose: firefighting, and to be able to water down the corners of the newest sections of the mountain’s longest trail, colloquially referred to as the Aspen Glades.
“Fifty Six Twenty is so big we just need to have names for sections so we know where we are,” Clarke says, as he plumbs in hundreds of metres of pipe to reservoirs that will connect in downhill succession to pressurize garden hoses. Some of the system’s design comes from long talks with other bike parks and builders, but some of it is not so different from the irrigation he has at home for his extensive hot-pepper garden. A father of two young kids and a lifelong mountain biker, Clarke also makes hot sauce in his spare time, which he sells out of the Tantrum bike shop.
It all goes to say he is the creative type: part problem solver, part tinkerer, part visionary. He moved to Revelstoke from Jasper, Alberta, 20 years ago in part because he wanted to build bike trails in the Selkirk Mountains, where the soils are perfect. In turn, he’s the architect of many classic downhill tracks in Revelstoke, like Boulder Mountain’s Gravy Bacon. He’s also been the head of grooming at RMR almost since soon after it opened.
“Fifty percent of moving to Revy was to further my grooming career, the other 50 percent was to build trails,” he says.
So, when the original head of the bike park’s trail crew, Keenan Kovacs, moved on last summer, Clarke was honored to be offered that spot. He says he had 10 years of ideas for trails and features in his head already and was excited at the opportunity to take care of what was already built. He’s quick to note he loves the park as is, and everything Keenan did before him.
Aaron Clarke““I’m honored to get to take care of his trails, he’s a legend around here,” Clarke says. ”
He’s also super excited about the new Aspen Glades section, built last fall by Red Bull Rampage Digger Award-winner Alan Mandel. So much so that he’s willing to water it every morning—that’s his level of dedication.
Aspen Glades is a series of blue rolls, tables, and corners that you barely have to touch your brakes for. Its flow matches the best trails in the world, and while Clarke comes from a background of digging more natural singletrack, he knows how special this new section is, and how much people love it. He’s taking care of it, and the entire park, with the same exacting standard he puts into grooming in the winter.
For him, it’s a return to the passions that brought him here. As logging ramped up in the early 2000s, he saw many of his trails disappear. Then when he had his kids, he had no time to volunteer to build anymore. So, the chance to take care of RMR’s park came at the exact right time.
“I was losing a bit of myself,” he says of the years he wasn’t able to build trails.
Getting back into it as his full-time job now is a dream come true. As are the satisfied looks of every rider that passes by. If you’re one of them, and you spy him on the side of the trail, make sure to shout a thank you. But even he wouldn’t ask you to stop—he’s too hard at work honing the trail so you won't have to.