ideRide Blog

Mountain Bike,Riding, Guiding and instruction on Vermont's Kingdom Trails

In May 2009 Kingdom Trails executive director Tim Tierny approached ideRide about rebuilding one of their signature trails, Kitchel. This trail was always a favorite way to finish a long loop on Darling Hill. Its decent into East Burke featured a series of berms that were fun but old and in disrepair. Kingdom trails saw this as an excellent spot to build a “machine trail”.  A machine trail is built with an excavator and has a wider tread path often with technical trail features like berms, rollers and jumps creating the grade changes.  This type of trail is rising in popularity at bike parks everywhere and so it was important for  Kingdom Trails to add one to keep our system progressive and interesting.  IdeRide is dedicated to promoting the progression of trails, skills and the great sport of mountain biking so we were excited to say the least. In mid June trail designer/builder Knight, armed with the ideRide excavator met the Kingdom Trails Crew on site. Over the course of three weeks (with a long lull in the middle due to a broken excavator track) a radical new trail was born. Knight designed the jumps to be low angle and user friendly and the berms with wide radii. The Kingdom Trails Crew and ideRider Erik Mentes shaped and dialed meticulously. The resulting trail is fun for the whole family, on a busy day the hoots and yells of joy can be heard in East Burke. Look for more trails like this in KT’s future.

Check Out This Cool Webisode By Mocean365 http://vimeo.com/5802388

Ride Guide TV is a weekly snowboard, freeski and mountain bike television series. Back in 2008, before the birth of ideRide we made this litle promo vid For Kingdom trails. Ride Guide sent a crew and we spent two days showing off the best that Kingdom Trails has to offer. Everyone was a little bummed out when they didn’t send Ride Guide host, Darcy Turene but the resulting video was top notch. It never made it to the weekly TV show but its on the Ride Guide website.

This video is especially fun for me because of the segment that shows me with my dog Zoey, she’s the best little trail dog out there. Kingdom trails posted this video on their website and now whenever I’m out on the trails with Zoey I hear peple saying” hey, isn’t that the little dog from the website?”<embed src=”http://rideguidebike.mobilerider.com/embed/small_wide/891/18596/”
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I’m just now dragging these shot out from an early summer jam at our indoor park. Dave Smutoc, Clint Mcmahon and some friends came and ripped it up. Clint backflipped everything in the place and Smutoc laid down some of his usual smoothness.
This space is notorious for frustating photographers with its low light but Ryan has what it takes to get the shot.

December 11 Kingdom Trails held their annual employee/volunteer appreciation party. The Pizza was awesome, the beer was even better and executive director, Tim Tierny summed up the good vibe with an excellent speech.

On a recent trip to sunny California I made my way to the Vans/Pro-Tec corporate headquarters for a meeting with Ari, head of marketing for Pro-Tec. After talking for a while it became obvious that ideRide and Pro-Tec are a perfect match. ideRide is a company that is all about progression, whether its progression of the sport itself or progression of an individual’s skills. Although Pro-Tec has been the standard for skate/bmx gear they are a relative newcomers to the Mtn Bike scene and are actively developing a great product line that they are calling “protection for progression” 
All ideRide coaches will be going into the 2010 season decked head to toe in the sick gear that Pro-Tec has to offer.
This deal gives Pro-Tec great exposure on Kingdom Trails, a “hot spot” for Mtn. Biking on the East Coast, and ideRide great protection for thier progression.