Nonprofit improves bike trails across the valley

Ever shred Spencer Mountain’s Otter Pop trail at mach chicken and hit a booter that sends your stomach into your throat? Flowy, fast mountain bike trails like that are built with care and require maintenance, and lucky for valley locals and visitors alike, Flathead Area Mountain Bikers (FAMB) is up to the task.

The club started as a volunteer organization in 2005 to protect the freeride trails at Spencer Mountain just west of Whitefish. Eventually, it grew into a nonprofit organization and currently has a handful of paid employees and hundreds of volunteers.

Before being hired as the organization’s executive director last September, Ron Brandt served on FAMB’s board for five years, focused on trials and advocacy, and spent the last couple years on the group’s trails committee.

“We’re trying to touch as many places as we can and make trails better for everyone,” Brandt said. “Obviously, everything we do will be in places I think would be fun to bike, but we try to make the trail experience better for everybody that is using it.”

As its name suggests, FAMB works on trails, not only in the Whitefish area, but all over the valley. The organization’s effect is felt from the Beardance trail near Bigfork to Taylor Creek near Whitefish, and from Cedar Flats at Columbia Falls to the Tally Lake Ranger District.

Spencer Mountain is owned by the state and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation manages the area. It is FAMB’s homebase and they’ve crafted myriad trails there.

Recently, their work involved a refresh of Otter Pop and part of Maple Syrup, two wildly popular trails that needed work due to a string of events that began two years ago.

A large wind event in 2020 took out trees all over Whitefish and a salvage lumber harvest at Spencer was planned. An unusually wet May caused the logging to be postponed, so work didn’t begin until July of last summer.

“It’s all state trust land, so if they have opportunities to make money for the schools, they do it,” Brandt said. “The loggers did a great job not impacting our trails very much. Kudos to those guys and the DNRC.”

The loss of the trees in the area caused the trails to become drier due to increased sun and wind exposure. The change in the amount of moisture the ground could hold meant the impact of use was multiplied, leaving some sections in rough shape.

“We tried to start our trailwork as late as possible, the end of October last year,” Brandt said. “We hoped to get all of Otter Pop completed last fall but in mid-November we got that snow storm.”

The FAMB trail crew had great momentum and needed only two more weeks to complete the work, but the snow that fell so furiously that day never left, and winter officially set in.

Before weather caused an abrupt halt to the work, Brant rode the trail with Julie Tickle, Executive Director of DREAM Adaptive. Since the trails needed to be reworked, the idea was to make them usable for more riders. They rode Otter Pop several times to determine what needed to be done to make it accessible for three-wheeled bikes.

After Whitefish Mountain Resort closed in April and spring arrived with a vengeance, FAMB was able to resume work and finished at Spencer in early May. Soon after, Brandt took a ride and was pleased when he saw people enjoying the newly refurbished trails.

“It was a pretty cool sight to see everybody out there riding what we just finished and doing it with big smiles and getting outside,” he said.

The cost of running machines and paying for operators adds up, so FAMB has organized a fundraiser to help pay for the improvements at the Spencer Mountain trails. Brandt said they are three-quarters of the way to their goal of $12,500.

“Even if people don’t want to donate specifically to that, just becoming a FAMB member is huge for us,” Brandt said. “All the money that comes to us, in one form or another, is going back to making trails better and keeping trails open for, not just mountain bikers, but for all user groups.”

WITH THE SPENCER trails open for business, FAMB shifted their focus westward. They began work in the Tally Lake Ranger District, clearing trees and drains and determining if there are any runoff issues. Brandt said some of the trails see heavier runoff that leads to washouts.

“Bony Gulch is one of the first trails out by Tally Lake we hit,” he said. “They cleared 160 trees in under 2 miles — it was like a microburst or something. I know it was super hard work, but super rewarding work, too.”

FAMB has an agreement with the Flathead National Forest, where Tally Lake is located, to work on the land together. Private donations along with support from the Whitefish Community Foundation and the Great American Outdoor Act (GAOA) fund FAMB’s work.

“We have a five-year cost share agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, which is funded by the GAOA, to work on deferred maintenance in the Flathead National Forest,” Brandt said. “The Forest Service just doesn't have the trail crews they once had and there are hundreds and hundreds of miles of trail around here. They do a great job but they just simply don’t have the manpower to keep up with the blowdown every year.”

Right now, the FAMB trail crew is clearing the Beardance trail south of Bigfork in the Flathead National Forest and next month they will be near Hungry Horse working on the Fawn Creek trail.

“Last year we did a super fun project that involved brushing and tree clearing on Fawn Creek, which is a trail that‘s been impassable for the better part of a decade,” Brandt said. “This year, we’re going to go back and do tread work for a week, teaming up with the Forest Service again, to totally bring that trail back… and make it fun for more users.”

IN ADDITION TO building and maintaining trails, FAMB offers seven women’s and four youth skills clinics in the summer, hosted at various places across the valley.

“It isn’t just skills we teach but trail etiquette as well,” he said. “We are a user group that goes faster than other user groups, so we’re trying to raise the next group of bikers to have good awareness while they’re having fun. Obviously, we focus on fun with our youth clinics and getting kids outside, doing cool things.”

Currently, FAMB has one trail crew that transitions from building trails at Spencer to maintaining trails throughout the valley. Brandt is stoked to expand FAMB’s workforce for a major upcoming project.

“Next season, because we are moving into a very large project on the Whitefish face, next to Whitefish Mountain Resort … our plan is to have two trail crews because we’ll be constructing trails as well as maintaining trails in midsummer,” he said excitedly. “I'll have a build crew and a maintenance crew all year.”

In July, Brandt hopes to be hiking and flagging potential trails for the Taylor/Hellroaring Project that will incorporate 26 miles of trail to the west of Whitefish Mountain Resort.

“The coolest thing that we do is our partnerships with other organizations and trying to help them maintain or build cool trails whenever we can,” Brandt said, “They are all doing really cool things.”

Brandt mentioned the Forest Service, DNRC, Whitefish Legacy Partners and Gateway to Glacier along with the City of Whitefish, which he described as a key player at Spencer and at the pump track near the dog park.

“Obviously, we’ve got a lot of really cool backcountry stuff around here but the reality of it is, most of us recreate in the front country,” he said. “That’s why we live here, that’s what we have time for, so we are making that usable and a better experience for as many people as we can.”