TRUCKEE, Calif. – The ski resorts are closed, the snow is melting and many people are dusting off their mountain bikes, putting air in their tires, and hitting the trails. One Truckee group has been working behind the scenes all year to make sure the trails are ready and accessible once mountain biking season starts. 

The Truckee Dirt Union is a volunteer-based organization that aims to make mountain biking more accessible in the Truckee-region, through maintenance of existing trails and advocacy for intentionally- built new trails. Their motto is “singletrack radness,” and they aim to embody that in everything they do.

Like many new organizations, TDU was founded during the pandemic, when co-founder Matt Chappell was looking for something different. 

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“The Forest Service, at the onset of the pandemic, they needed some assistance in the forest… the opportunity just kind of bubbled up to the surface again and I took a big deep breath and thought about it for a week and maybe that week turned into a year but there was a time when it really made sense,” said Chappell. “I wanted to spend more time in the forest on my bike with my friends and less time driving a desk and talking about marketing.” 

Chappell has a background in marketing and communications, as well as in cycling. He was a competitive racer and was on the board of the Truckee Trails Foundation. During his time in the Truckee cycling community, he had been part of conversations about starting a group like TDU. 

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“The idea has been spoken about, creating a mountain bike-specific advocacy team in Truckee has been talked about in various conversations for at least as long as I’ve been here, which has been 25 years,” said Chappell.

One of TDU’s biggest contributions to the community is through its trail stewardship days. They work with local land managers such as the Forest Service and California State Parks and invite community members out to work on trails. 

“That’s a big part of the puzzle because we want to give people a connection to trail networks so that they take pride in it and become stewards of the land themselves,” said Chappell. 

There are hundreds of miles of trails in the Truckee/Tahoe region and Chappell said they are lucky that so many people put in some much work to build these in the past. These have been built by organizations such as the Truckee Donner Land Trust, Truckee Trails Foundations, and many restaurants and businesses in the area. 

“We’re really fortunate to come in at a point where we can organize big, voluminous workforces, sometimes as big as 90 people,” said Chappell. 

One of the organization’s focus areas is on the Donkey Town Trail network, formerly known as Jackass Trail. That trail network, off of Highway 89, near the Mouse Hole, is one of the area’s more popular trail networks. Many of the trails there were user-created but TDU has been working with land managers to steward them into public use. 

Part of the reasoning is to make these already popular trails more accessible for all riders and part of it is to shift focus away from other user-created trails that might not be safe and accessible and have negative environmental impacts. 

“We have a vision for Donkey Town and it’s going to have many trails nested within it, it’s going to be optimized for the 28,000 user laps we’re tracking each season on it,” said Chappell. 

In addition, they want to take what they’ve learned from that network and replicate it on other user-generated networks in the area. 

“There are several other perplexing trail networks in Truckee and we hope to keep some of those namesake trails within those networks,” said Chappell. 

The newest wing of TDU is a conservation wing. They have expressed interest in preserving parts of land within Truckee. 

“We’re trying to get people to understand what lands can be accessed but we’re also hoping to motivate the mountain bike demographic to take the high road as much as possible because we are endeavoring on protecting, conserving and gaining access to many of the trails in our community that were user-created,” said Chappell. 

Finally, TDU wants to act as a communication hub for the Truckee trail network. They’ve partnered with 101.5 FM to host a Singletrack Report during which they talk about trail conditions and give updates about where land managers might be doing known trail-related work that could impact riders, such as prescribed burns. To listen to that report visit https://www.truckeetahoeradio.com/on-demand-singletrack-report/. 

To learn more about TDU’s work, follow them on Instagram @truckeedirtunion.