Harry Utsal is tall and skinny, making the coil-sprung 29’er underneath him look like a play bike. He maneuvers it with the kind of leverage that long limbs obscure—subtle corrections and weight shifts are mostly imperceptible but add up to microseconds, then seconds, then minutes at the end of the day. Except no one’s timing him.

“Man, I wish there was still a race here,” says Utsal as he collects himself under the canopy of a giant cedar tree on Revelstoke, British Columbia’s Boulder Mountain.

A graphic designer by day and a new dad, Utsal started racing enduros only a few seasons ago. He’s done the Kamloops stop of the Canadian Enduro League (CEL) at Harper Mountain three times, and the Revelstoke edition only once. He was looking forward to competing at home again this summer on his local trails after an injury last season, but the CEL isn’t coming back.

After 221 racers tested their mettle down Boondocker in 2023—a showpiece gravity trail for the town—it barely rained for almost three months, rendering the trail near impossible to rehabilitate from the race’s heavy wear. Environment Canada recorded just 3.5 inches between June and July of that year, when normal would be 10. Revelstoke sits in a wet belt that has a near-identical climate to the Pacific Northwest. This rare inland version of a coastal ecosystem runs 385 miles north from the U.S. border up into the continental plateau near the city of Prince George. It’s part of what gives Canada’s westernmost province its lore as a mountain bike destination.