Welcome to the 2017 riding season! It was a wild winter but the spring was... drying up well. Thank you to all of the trail workers out there that have the trails already in some amazing shape. In case you are living under a rock I am sure you have all heard that the majority of the trails across the UV are now open. Please respect trail closed signed in certain networks as they firm up.

There are a few announcements and updates that are key to our group here.

The first is that we new now have a official board in place and its already paying off. Here are the members and the Committees that in place.

Elected Board Members:

Chair - Brian R

VC Chair - Jerry

Secretary - Jane 

Finance - Rob H

Board Members:

Liz, Clayton, Vanessa, Janet, Kevin, Jason, Rob, Brenden

Current Committees:

Community Outreach, Pubic Awareness

Events

Finances

Marketing

Politics

Trail Accessibility

Trail Days

Second is that while it was a bummer that the gathering for last Sunday was rained out (keep an eye out for a new date) we are still planning on May 21 as the Spring work day. Keep your eye out to Facebook & Strava for more details.

Group rides are now starting so please keep your eyes out for the local shops and jump on a few rides. 

One topic I did want to talk about is the power of community and it’s place on our networks. We are the stewards of the networks around the Upper Valley. On bikes we see more the network than all of the other user groups. This provides us with the ability to see and report on the trails. Over the last year Blot has seen a few concerning actions with people blazing trails, cutting trees, removing obstacles and generally not working with the larger group. As the networks grows with popularity this will continue and its critical to the long term success of our group that we call out people when we see this type of action.

We have 3 ways to measure use and community impact and they are critical to our health. 

• Membership - Please renew right away! This is by far our biggest voice and provides 90% of our total budget. The larger our numbers the more our group is respected in the UV.
• Trail Work Hours - Every hour you spend on a trail working on it is a direct investment back into the club. Move that downed branch when you ride past it. 
• Strava - Data is king with planning these days. When you use Strava it provides critical anonymous data that shows key metrics about the system. Please log your rides and help us further become on the of the elite clubs with Big Data analytics. 

 We will send out updates through out the season but in the meantime enjoy the trails and ride safe! 

Cheers,

Brian