In 1999, while living in a bus parked somewhere high in Colorado’s central mountains, Joey Klein started to write a cover letter. This was for a job with the Boulder-based International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA), which was looking for someone to drive a sponsored Subaru around the c ountry to promote trail building and maintenance. This appealed to Klein.  While working as a ski bum at Arapahoe Basin, he had developed a strong passion for mountain bike trails ー as demonstrated by those he built at nearby Keystone Resort. Plus, he was accustomed to living on four wheels (specifically a 1968 International school bus).  But how to sell himself to lead IMBA’s Trail Care Crew? What to write in that cover letter?  “I remember saying my favorite thing was watching people ride a (trail) section that was built and seeing people smile,” Klein recalled. “That was the stoke.”  That is the stoke he has chased for 26 years now ー all the way to the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.  Klein, 60, was recently inducted to the class celebrated at the Marin Museum of Bicycling in Fairfax, Calif. The organization called him “a trailblazing figure,” noting him as IMBA’s longest-serving employee whose “influence is likely felt by anyone enjoying a well-built trail today.”  Klein has worked in 14 countries and 45 states. That of course includes his home state of Colorado, where he is better known as Uncle Joey. A former race host and commentator, Rod Elisha, gave him another name: “the Johnny Appleseed of mountain biking.” Colorado’s Joey Klein has traveled the world educating on trail building and maintenance. Here he is talking to riders in Cedar City, Utah. (Courtesy Joey Klein) Two decades ago Klein counted mentors ー one being Tony Boone, another Coloradan who preceded him on the frontier of mountain bike trail construction ー and now people count him as a mentor. One of them is Leah Mancabelli, who previously worked under Klein at the start of her trail building career.  Now in California, Mancabelli attended Klein’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony.  “In classic Joey form, he took no credit,” Mancabelli said. “He just wanted to talk about all the partners he worked with on the way.”  Some of them commented in a celebratory video. A woman from the Navajo Nation thanked him for “igniting the spark of the mountain bike movement” at her home. The sentiment might be shared by others at Klein’s career stops ー China, Singapore, Scotland, Australia and Israel to name a few, not to mention all across America’s mountains, deserts, woods and coasts. Uncle Joey’s Instagram provides a glimpse into his work, between his play skiing 14,000-foot mountains. Klein has posted about projects in “favorite states” of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, with other fairly recent posts showing him teaching or building around California, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota, somewhere near Dallas and somewhere in Florida, around terrain that was sandy and coated with crushed seashells.  “This dudes everywhere there are trails to build,” wrote one commenter. Joey Klein at the controls of a dozer on a machine-built trail in Utah. (Courtesy Joey Klein) Ask Klein for some favorite builds, and he’ll bring up the Coldwater Mountain network that inspired outdoor play and economic hopes in an economically depressed part of Alabama. Ask IMBA Executive Director David Wiens, and he’ll bring up Klein’s work around Bentonville, Ark., on trails now world-famous.  The number of countries and states have been counted, but the number of trails and miles seem impossible to count.  “His fingerprints are on so many trails across the globe,” Wiens said. And thanks to Klein’s educating at construction sites and in classrooms and his advocating around negotiating tables with land managers, “his influences are multiplied many times over,” Wiens said.  He knows Uncle Joey to be “a savant.” Others in that Hall of Fame video called Klein “a visionary” and “a legend.”  Said another, Arapahoe Basin Chief Operating Officer Alan Henceroth: “I think of Joey as sort of like a half mad scientist and half brilliant artist.”  Zach Ryan, front, Joey Klein and Maria Leech ride the Beavers Loop Trail at Arapahoe Basin. The trail starts at 12,500 feet. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette) Before Klein’s more recent years of building vaunted, high alpine trails at A-Basin, Henceroth knew Klein from his ski bumming days. Out of high school in Golden in 1982, Klein went on to be a shaggy member of a small, ragtag bunch who would go down in A-Basin lore: The Atomic Janitors lived above the bar in the A-frame. They cleaned as janitors do. “But we skied our asses off,” Klein said. “And we partied a lot.”  Atop a 10 speed bike in the middle of a snowstorm, he’d shoot down the highway to the party in town. He was always down for a good time, while he always somehow managed to score As and Bs despite often skipping class back in high school. Maybe it was time to get serious about education, he got to thinking.  “I think the best thing that ever happened was going to school in Durango, Fort Lewis, in 1988,” he said.  Not exactly for the education; he was back to ski bumming after a couple of semesters. But for that time and place, Klein said: “That was right when mountain biking was blowing up.”  The “klunker” revolution had played out in Crested Butte, where rebels known as the Grubstake Gang were riding makeshift bikes down the rocky, perilous likes of Pearl Pass. This was in the mid-’70s, the time and place of what many point to as the birthplace of mountain biking. As far as ideal trails, “we didn’t have a lot to work with,” said Art Burrows, a rider from that era and renowned outdoorsman living in Aspen. “We ended up pushing our bikes a lot, and in some cases we ended up getting lost and spending the night out.”  Hence the need for trails. “It was all bandit trail building,” Burrows said. “Basically just walking through the woods and figuring out interesting alignments.” This was part of the “boom” Klein noticed around Durango in 1988. More than that, “what we noticed were the bikes,” he said. Bikes were no longer those klunkers but now specially manufactured, increasingly formidable. Thus ridership increased ー as did resistance to them.  Environmentalists pushed back, seeing those bikes cause erosion and damage. And land managers pushed back, seeing those riders carve trails for themselves without proper planning. This was why IMBA formed in 1988.  “It was like, ‘OK, how can we do this in a way that isn’t unauthorized? How can we do this with the blessing of land managers and the communities and various stakeholders?'” Wiens said.  “That’s where Joey came in,” said Burrows, who would get to know Klein over the years as Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley became a Gold Level Ride Center, as IMBA ranks it.  It seemed unlikely ー a ski bum leading a charge into the next century.  “All of a sudden he’s this young educator traveling around the country in his Subaru teaching people about tread and drainage and sustainable design,” Burrows said.  Joey Klein rides a spine or rock on a trail system he oversaw at Cedar City, Utah. (Courtesy Tyson Swasey) It wasn’t all that sudden. Prior to joining IMBA in 1999, Klein had cut his teeth at Keystone Resort, where he saw mountain biking potential.  Rather than landscaping or washing dishes for the summer, he convinced Keystone leadership to let him build destination trails of the sort that were sprouting at other ski resorts. And as Klein built at Keystone he taught mountain biking there. He has said he was the one who learned: Beyond the double-black diamond thrills he craved, he saw in his students the joy of simpler, flowy trails, and he thought more about how best to build them.  Klein was making a mountain biking name for himself in other ways through the ’90s. He was winning Montezuma’s Revenge, the former 24-hour race that was an unmarked course of old mining and logging roads, technical descents and ascents in which the bike needed to be carried, such as for the ascent up Grays Peak above 14,000 feet.  “There’d always be lightning and everything else,” Klein said. “Rain, cold, snowing, avalanches, you name it.” And so along with trails he had built fortitude prior to joining IMBA. The Subaru-roving position was critical to the nascent organization, the executive director at the time said in the video for Klein’s Hall of Fame induction.  “The simple truth is we didn’t have much to hang our hats on. We didn’t have much sweat equity,” Tim Blumenthal said. “And then Joey Klein arrived.”  Off he went ー 14 countries and 45 states over the past 26 years. And yes, fortitude would matter. As would Klein’s “open-mindedness,” as Blumenthal alluded to.  Joey Klein, aka Uncle Joey, is credited for bringing a smile to trail projects he worked on in his home state of Colorado and across the globe. (Courtesy Joey Klein) Those mountain biking concerns in the ’80 never went away; they’ve only amplified in some particularly busy, environmentally sensitive places. Klein has been known to prioritize those concerns. “Some mountain bikers have blinders on and they can’t see anything else,” Wiens said. “From the very beginning, Joey understood the different interests involved, the different personalities involved, and he understood the challenges that land managers were tasked with.”  Mancabelli, that proud pupil now in California, saw imagined trail mileage significantly cut down while planning projects alongside Klein. She saw trails built for hikers and equestrians rather than mountain bikers. And Klein always seemed pleased.  “He understood that if someone came to the project even with a negative voice, they were invested in the project nonetheless and they could positively impact that project, whatever the outcome may be,” Mancabelli said.  It’s true, Wiens said: “I don’t think Joey knows what being combative is.”  For Uncle Joey, it was always about those smiles he wrote about in that cover letter 26 years ago.  It was about work, but it was more about fun. That’s what Mancabelli learned from him. She remembered a project that took them to the Pacific Northwest, where she had never been before.  “And he was like, ‘You’ve never been surfing? We gotta go surfing!'” she said.  “So he calls up the surf shop, and after work we have like 30 minutes to get to the surf shop, get the boards, rent them, wake up at 6 the next morning to go surfing before we have to go to work again. It was maybe a little dangerous, but he saw my ability and was like, ‘You absolutely got this.’ He never let me question whether or not I could do something.”  Joey Klein, aka “Uncle Joey,” leads Zach Ryan through a rock garden while riding the Beavers Loop Trail at Arapahoe Basin Ski Area. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette) ...read more read less