Northern Terminus Trails Boom at the Top of the Sunshine Coast
It’s 5 a.m. on the longest day of the year in Powell River, a remote town wedged between mountains and sea on British Columbia’s coast. Matt McDowell and two other members of the self-proclaimed “Dawn Patrol” ride group, Wes Oram and Dean Piccinin, grind up a steep and loose logging road toward a sub-peak of Mount Mahony where the trail Civil Disobedience begins.
Carter, McDowell’s teenage son, was reluctantly jolted awake and forced to join this venture. Chatter is minimal. Breathing is heavy. Getting to this remote trail normally requires an hour of laborious climbing that only gets steeper as the elevation increases. The sting in the tail is a 20-minute hike-a-bike through thick blueberry bushes. It’s not everyone’s idea of a casual morning spin. Thankfully, yesterday afternoon, we had met Fraser Newton, a bike mechanic at Taw’s Bike Garage. “It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’m in. We can shuttle in my truck,” Newton says, generously rescuing us from a 4 a.m. departure.
Now we’re rallying up the logging road. Dubreggae plays on the stereo. The floral aroma of cannabis seeps from ripped upholstered seats. Twenty minutes after leaving the Mount Mahony parking lot, Newton guides his truck onto another road. This one’s steeper, narrower, and half overgrown with alders. He barely takes his foot off the gas. The passenger side rearview mirror is now semi-detached and dangling uselessly against the door.
Our timing is perfect. We meet up with the Dawn Patrol as they push the final few vertical feet to a rocky knob that marks the start of Civil Disobedience. Twisted cedars and hemlocks grow from cracks in the granite. We’re fresh. The Dawn Patrol members are sweaty.
Motivated by the promise of a golden sunrise, our group of seven drops in. The trail is immediately technical and mind engaging. It’s more cross-country than gravity, a fact that must be supremely disappointing to many Civil Disobedience initiates. In five minutes, we emerge from dense forest onto a sloping, cliff-side bench of granite. It’s death to the left. A bike-length away, the mountain drops sheer toward Haslam Lake. To the southwest, the Salish Sea is dark but the rising sun brushes the mountain tops of Texada and Vancouver islands with amber light. To the east, there’s an ocean of endless Coast Mountain summits.
The view at this particular point is a big reason mountain bikers choose to bite off a Civil Disobedience mission. After the requisite photos are taken, it’s go time. Newton leads, setting a ferocious early-morning pace not dissimilar to his driving style—full bore. I feel it in my arms. The trail has everything fans of flow hate: steep, fall-away corners, relentlessly janky rocks, slippery off-camber roots, and punchy climbs right when you thought the climbing was over, followed by even more jank. I love it, in a masochistic way. So does McDowell.
“Civil Disobedience has become an obsession of mine,” he says. “I’ve probably ridden it 75 times since 2019.”
The trail is the progeny of obsession. It cost a solitary builder five years of his life and a marriage, they say. We appreciate his sacrifice. The clock is ticking. Newton is due back for a birthday breakfast with his wife and kids. McDowell needs to get Carter to school. Piccinin has to put his electrician’s tool belt on. Oram needs to swap chamois and bike jersey for nursing scrubs. After 45 minutes of forearm-burning descending, we’re back at the Mount Mahony parking lot. It’s a quick farewell, as riders on more civilized schedules roll in for their morning rides.
If 4 a.m. starts aren’t your cup of Kool-Aid, there’s no need to worry—Powell River has you covered. There’s likely a group just right for you. In addition to the Dawn Patrol, there’s the Hot Mess Express, the Maze Men, the Chain Gang Trail Builders, the Silver Cyclists, the Mahony Mobsters and probably some others. Each has their own rituals and custom jerseys. None take themselves too seriously.
Powell River’s distinctive spirit is a function of place. The city sits at the northern end of the Sunshine Coast, just 75 miles away in a straight line from millions of Vancouver residents. Though it’s situated on mainland Canada, Powell River feels like an island. Getting there requires at least two ferries and a winding drive from anywhere. Its character is also a function of a history that’s as rugged as the surrounding landscape.
In the early 1900s, the Powell River Paper Company built a huge pulp and paper mill on land stolen from the Tla’amin First Nation, which had a village on the site for centuries, if not thousands of years prior. That was the tenor of the times. Human rights didn’t apply to Indians. Native kids were taken from their parents and shipped off to often-abusive, church-run residential schools. For nearly a century loggers felled the surrounding coastal rainforest to feed the mill. At its peak, it was the largest pulp and paper mill in BC, cranking out newsprint for the Los Angeles Times, among other major metro dailies. Some locals like to brag that Fifty Shades of Grey was printed on Powell River paper.
In the boom days of the ‘70s and ‘80s, when AC/DC’s “Back in Black” topped the classic rock charts, a teenager could stroll out of high school in Powell River and get a job pushing buttons or brooms at the mill, driving a logging truck, or running a chainsaw. They’d bring home a paycheck fat enough to afford a new pickup truck, dirt bike, boat, and a summer cabin on the lake.
Most locals who didn’t get paid themselves from the mill have a family member who did.
“I worked on the paper machine for five years. It was mind-numbing,” says the Dawn Patrol’s McDowell.
Powell River was a town full of rednecks making a lot of money from logging and living like it would last forever. It didn’t.
Instead, the mill followed the downward trajectory of the newspaper industry. In 2023, it closed for good. The smokestacks and cavernous warehouses now sit empty in old town, a prime waterfront location waiting for a new purpose. Vacant commercial buildings whisper of a time when money flowed through the city like spring runoff from the Coast Mountains.
While the mill churned out paper, a grassroots core of climbers, hikers, and mountain bikers had reveled in their own backyard paradise of granite walls, lush coastal forests, and rarely climbed peaks. Singletrack trails expanded around Duck Lake Protected Area and became an extensive network of pedal-intensive, up-hill-both-directions riding. Many trails feature impressive wooden bridges and boardwalks, the handiwork of a crochety crew of mountain bike-hating retirees known as the BOMB squad, the Bloody Old Men Brigade. The infrastructure was nevertheless used, enjoyed, and admired by mountain bikers. At this point, Powell River had a bubble of mountain biking culture that existed unknown to the broader world. Then the BC Bike Race happened.
“We’d see trucks and vans and hundreds of racers getting off the ferry but they weren’t stopping in Powell River,” says Wayne Brewer, a retired local lawyer. “We were like, ‘Hey, we’ve got mountain bike trails, too.’”
The remote city was just a gas and snack stop for the BC Bike Race (BCBR) caravan as it traveled between stages on Vancouver Island and further south on the Sunshine Coast.
Brewer and others enticed BCBR co-founders Andreas Hestler and Dean Payne to visit with their bikes in the off-season. They liked what they saw. The community embraced the race and BCBR embraced the community. In 2010, Powell River was added as a stage and Brewer went on to serve as local course director for nine years. “There’s no doubt that the BC Bike Race put us on the map,” says Brad Winchell, president of the Qathet Regional Cycling Association.
“We’d see trucks and vans and hundreds of racers getting off the ferry but they weren’t stopping in Powell River. We were like, ‘Hey, we’ve got mountain bike trails, too." —Wayne Brewer
Winchell grew up in Powell River, left for university, then returned as a professional engineer to work at the paper mill until it closed. Now he works remotely—there are no big employers left in Powell River. In fact, there’s not much in the way of “work” to be had at all. But if lifestyle is more important than nine-to-fives, for entrepreneurial people and self-starters, Powell River is like a blend of paradise found and diamond in the rough.
“Mountain biking is a big reason we moved here,” says Lindsay Gosnell, who was born and raised in Banff, raced bikes in Alberta, and lived in Squamish with her husband and two young kids until 2018. Gosnell and her husband knew they wanted to raise their family in a more affordable small town with easy access to the outdoors. After a visit with friends who had already made the move to Powell River, they were convinced. “Yeah, I’m a ‘Squamigrant,’” Gosnell says with a laugh, owning a term that is now less pejorative than it is a friendly jab. “We were able to tap into this amazing cycling community that was so welcoming.”
Gosnell served six years as a local cycling association board member. It’s a similar story for Fraser Newton. As a veteran bike mechanic for the BCBR, he had fond memories of camping on the sea at Willingdon Beach, watching epic sunsets as he and fellow mechanics wrenched on racers’ bikes and crushed beers. He was looking at either being a renter for life in Squamish or searching elsewhere for a place to call home. With the mountain biking scene going off in Powell River, the choice was easy.
The arrival of the BC Bike Race had another impact on Powell River: It exposed what it did and didn’t have in terms of trail offerings. The relentlessly wiggly singletrack—much of it hiking trails first, biking trails second—around Duck Lake served the aerobic needs of the spandex-clad, cross-country racing nerds who love crushing out 30 miles with minimal downhill payoff. But that’s a species in decline in many mountain bike habitats. For Powell River parents trying to coax kids into mountain biking, or anyone with a taste for all-mountain riding, there wasn’t much to blow the hair back. Soulful as it was, Powell River lacked the blend of flow and gravity that makes for a true mountain bike destination.
On a sunny morning, photographer Kari Medig and I are gassed 15 minutes into the Mount Mahony climbing trail as we try pointlessly to hold onto the back tires of Gosnell and Chris Scott, both on electric-assist mountain bikes. Gosnell is playing hooky from a small window and door business she owns with her hubby. Scott, a Powell River local who used to build houses and now builds trails for a living, dropped his tools to join us for a spin on Fairies Wear Boots. It’s a popular trail he worked on after hours back when he was still in the construction business full time.
“It’s a dream come true,” Scott says about being able to turn trailbuilding into a job.
We regroup at the top of Fairies. It begins with a wooden ramp and a six-footer onto a perfect transition of tacky dirt. Gosnell sends first and Scott follows. Gosnell is smooth and fast. Scott is just fast.
This trail is popular for good reason. The berms are tasty and still hold some springtime moisture. There are steep granite slab rolls and committed, no-fall, techy sections of rock with optional ride-arounds.
Then there’s the signature feature, a 29-foot creek gap. Gosnell and Scott stop above.
“You’ve got to take a couple of pedal strokes after that corner to get enough speed,” Gosnell says. “Come on, I’ll tow you in.” I follow and do as told, pumping a couple of mid-cassette pedal strokes before launching the gap. I’m inches away from casing my back tire.
There was a time when Civil Disobedience was the only trail on Mount Mahony. It’s a not-for-everyone type of riding experience. Today, Mahony has all the hallmarks of a modern mountain biking trail network. An impressive sign on a massive chunk of granite welcomes people to a spacious parking that opened in 2024, with trailhead toilets and a fire circle for après sessions. The Powell River Community Forest, which generates funding for community projects through sustainable logging, has so far contributed more than $360,000 Canadian dollars to trail and parking lot development. The government kicked in another $250,000 under a tourism development program. The machine-built climbing trail delivers riders to grom-friendly greens and double-black descents, and everything in between. There’s now a trail for everyone at Mount Mahony. You can even pay for a shuttle with Ride Mount Mahony, a company started in early 2025 by Johanna Jackson (now Roddan) and her husband Andrew Roddan.
Powell River-born Andrew is one of the Mahony Mobsters, a contingent of 20-and 30-something senders responsible for the complete rebuild of Quick-E, a stunt-intensive Mahony classic of massive step-ups, drops, and doubles.
Johanna grew up in North Vancouver but only started mountain biking in 2021. After meeting Andrew, they moved to Whistler. She remembers him telling her that they should move back to his hometown “because the mountain biking scene was about to blow up.”
“It’s an exciting time here in Powell River,” Johanna says. “We would never have started this company if it didn’t align with the community’s vision for Mahony.”
It’s exciting in more ways than one. The community has taken big strides to reconcile a once-fraught relationship with the region’s original inhabitants, the Tla’amin. Several years ago, the name of the regional district was officially changed from Powell River to Qathet, a Tla’amin word that means “working together.” The cycling association now has a Tla’amin representative on its board.
These days when people say they’re going to ride in Powell River, chances are they’re talking about Mount Mahony. It’s getting a lot of attention. YouTuber Rémy Métailler was recently in town to session Quick-E with the Roddans. Munch on a slice at Supercharger Pizza or sip a mojito at Costa del Sol Latin Cuisine and watch the traffic on Marine Avenue, Powell River’s main drag. It’s obvious that something has changed. The Sprinter vans have arrived and so have the rooftop campers. Racks loaded with bikes abound. It would be easy to forget where mountain biking started in this rough and tumble resource town.
“Some of the older cross-country riders feel they’re getting overshadowed by the Mahony scene,” Winchell says. The Chain Gang hasn’t forgotten the Duck Lake network, the old school yin to Mount Mahony’s new school yang. With the BOMB squad aging out, they are the next generation of Powell River retirees and trailbuilding fanatics. They ride a lot. They build a lot.
Rain or shine, year round, the Chain Gang meets two days a week to work on trails and two days a week to ride. Warm evening light angles through the forest as we pedal along Green Line, an old logging railway grade repurposed into trail. A rusty length of two-inch-thick steel cable spools into the sword ferns, another relic of an industrial logging past. The pace is brisk for a group that ranges in age from mid-50s to early 70s.
They’re excited like kids to show us one of their new trails, Sweetwater 2.0. It follows Sweetwater Creek, a crystalline stream that courses through narrow slots and cascades from pool to pool. Thick moss in the surrounding forest seems to glow. The trail, I realize, is designed to complement this almost magical landscape—as much a work of art as it is a trail. We ride it in a train of eight. The banter among the group is non-stop. The language is salty, the jokes off-color, and the laughter constant. A knee-high rock drop leads to a skinny and a cantilevered bridge above the creek, made from hand-hewn cedar salvaged from the forest floor. The air is still fragrant with the scent of cedar sawdust.
Chain Ganger Mickey Adam says it’s all about hanging out in the bush, riding bikes, and “making fun of each other.”
He considers it therapy for the PTSD he suffers following a career as a firefighter. Without it, Adam says he’d be much worse off.
“It soothes my soul, plus I get to hang out with these assholes,” he says, before stepping on his pedals and disappearing down Sweetwater 2.0.
There’s a place—and a riding group—for everyone in Powell River. Yes, there’s differences of opinion about what makes a great trail or where re-sources should be deployed and spent. But it’s just mountain biking and taking it too seriously can be taking it too far.
Back on Mount Mahony, trailbuilding contractor Chris Scott distills the scene into simple Powell River terms.
“We all have to drink beer around the same campfire and get along,” he says. And get along they do. If mountain biking can be a unifying force, then this remote community on BC’s Sunshine Coast is living the truth.
