A year after winning the British Columbia high school provincial mountain bike championships, Valemount Secondary School riders are looking forward to this year’s championships in Whistler, coming at the end of May.

An early snowmelt allowed the group of 17 riders – a significant number for a school that now only has 85 students – to hit the trails early.

“We’ve been doing a lot of riding around Valemount and people have been going out and cleaning trails on an ongoing regular basis, which is really cool,” says teacher and coach Les van der Roest.

Since the Village of Valemount does not officially have an organization to maintain trails, the trail system is completely run by volunteers, many of whom are students, explains van der Roest. Many of the trails aren’t officially recognized by the province either.

But while the lack of official trails is something that needs improvement, van der Roest says, it hasn’t stopped the community from keeping them maintained.

“We’ve had a really good community activity in terms of trail maintenance here. We had a student in Grade 9 that started building his own trail, and it wasn’t a lousy trail, it was an excellent trail, and it’s been around for almost 10 years. We’ve had kids who have been involved in trail building, and most of the trails that have been built have been really good riding trails that continue to be maintained and used. We are pretty lucky that way, because we don’t have anything organized,” he says.

After last year’s provincial win on home turf, the club will travel to Whistler to compete at the end May, with the hopes of getting the club to Jasper to train on the trails a couple of times before that.

The community is receiving a new bus this week, and van der Roest says it should give them a bit more freedom in terms of travelling as a club.

The club has also received a lot of support from Jasper, including ten Kona bikes which they received through Freewheel Cycle on a discount from the shop and Kona, as well as getting a maintenance and mechanic’s tent for their provincial race last year.

“It’s a joint Kona/Freewheel thing, just because it’s such a good program and he does a ton for the kids out there,” says Chris Peel of Freewheel Cycle. “We came down and set up a mechanic stand for the team. We went through all their bikes and replaced cables and stuff like that, and made sure those guys had the mechanical advantage. It was a great event.”

All ten bikes from Freewheel are in use right now, van der Roest says, and this year there are seven new girls in Grades 8 to 10.