May 23, 2019
Take Care of Your Trails sets new records
The 3rd pan-European Take Care of Your Trails campaign has exceeded all expectations and showed the growing commitment of mountain bike volunteers across Europe to do trail work and preserve the outdoors.
Between the 6h of April and 5th of May, local trail crews put 152 events on the map in 15 different countries. In total, 2517 volunteers spent more than 15.000 hours on maintenance work, removing litter, pruning, reconstruction of natural and heritage trails and/or making trails accessible for multiple user groups.
‘Denmark reaps the benefits of promoting trail stewardship for years and becomes Best MTB Community Europe’
This years friendly competition between participating countries to become Best MTB community Europe was won by Denmark. Whether it was the IMBA Europe Summit that took place in Denmark and pushed the local crews to win the title on their own soil, or the succesful On Trail mapping project, fact is that Denmark mobilized the highest number of volunteers related to the size of its national MTB population. With 34 events and 622 volunteers, Denmark left other traditionally well-scoring countries like Slovenia (259), Scotland (203), France (493) , the Czech Republic (378) and Italy (244) behind.
At the MTB festival Søhøjlandet, Christoffer Riis Svendsen, DCU’s project manager for the On Trail project, received the award on behalf of IMBA Europe’s president Thomas Larsen Schmidt.
Christoffer has worked with many municipalities and volunteer groups to map, signpost and grade mountain bike trails in Denmark. The goal was to map 100 mountain bike trails across the country but the project is so succesfull that it has been extended with half a year and a new goal set at 200 trails.
“Now we can concentrate 100 percent on achieving our new goals. It is a great pleasure to get in touch with the many enthusiastic volunteers and to know that this project makes a big difference”, said Christoffer.
IMBA Europe and it’s members thank all volunteers for their dedication. See you back next year for TCoYT 2020!