Mike Snyder carried his muzzleloader through thick underbrush in the Mount Mansfield State Forest on a late-October day in 2020, hunting for deer. In a steep, wooded section, Snyder, then the state’s top forestry official, stumbled across something that stopped him in his tracks: a narrow dirt tr ail. The path was oddly clear of the leaves that had settled on the rest of the forest floor. He didn’t recall the state having approved any new trails in the area — something that, as commissioner of the Department of Forests, Parks and Recreation, he should have known about. Snyder followed the path for a bit, and his bafflement turned to astonishment. He discovered an elaborate series of wooden ramps, jumps, pathways and bridges, some constructed with two-by-fours and bolted securely into boulders and rock outcroppings. Snyder had stumbled across the Shangri-la of Vermont mountain bike trails, a hidden, highly technical two-loop course spanning 8,000 feet. If it were a ski run, a state forester would later observe, it would have rated a double-black diamond. Heavy rocks had been moved to create steeply banked downhill turns. Sections of the trail crossed small streams. An avid backcountry skier, Snyder had encountered and skied many illegally cut trails over the years. And he had worked with local groups to help legalize unsanctioned mountain biking trails, including a network at Perry Hill in Waterbury.  But this discovery was something else entirely. “The extent of the cutting and the digging and displacement of rock and penetration of hardware into rock for infrastructure — this was next level,” Snyder told Seven Days. Mike Snyder walking past a rock outcropping with bolts that remain from the trail Credit: Kevin McCallum The trail and the lengthy state investigation that followed would send shock waves through the Vermont mountain biking community — not just because of what was built but also who had built it. Last month, Attorney General Charity Clark announced a $35,000 settlement against two men who eventually admitted responsibility: endurance athletes Cyril Brunner and Aaron Rice. Both were also officers of the very trail organizations that were supposed to be partnering with the state to support responsible trail building. Brunner was secretary of the Stowe Trails Partnership until he stepped down after admitting responsibility in 2021. Rice was a board member of the Waterbury Area Trail Alliance. Both groups belong to the Vermont Mountain Bike Association, whose 28 local chapters manage most of the 1,200 legal mountain biking trails across the state. The revelation that officers of two VMBA chapters and their friends had built the unsanctioned trail underscored how stubbornly rooted the culture of rogue backcountry trail cutting remained in the state. Cutting unpermitted ski trails has a long tradition in Vermont, though it has largely been eclipsed by formal agreements between recreational backcountry trail groups and state and federal land managers. The practice among mountain bikers, however, has proven more difficult to stamp out. Riders eager for new terrain have found it easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. The extent of the cutting and the digging and displacement of rock… this was next level.Mike Snyder The highly publicized legal settlement, the first over a mountain bike trail, signals a harsher official stance against this outlaw tradition, which authorities see as a threat to Vermont’s wildlands — and to the progress that organizations have made in expanding legitimate trails across public and private land. Lisa Lynn, editor of VT Ski + Ride magazine and a former state economic development commissioner, has written editorials depicting illegal trail building as a scourge warranting official action. She owns a rental property on Nebraska Valley Road in Stowe, which bikers used to access the trail, and alerted state officials to what she referred to as Brunner’s “private mountain bike park” in the woods even before Snyder happened onto it. “The hubris and sense of entitlement here are astounding,” Lynn wrote to state officials in 2021. The rise of social media and fitness apps such as Strava that help people map and find trails, no matter how remote, means that rogue construction building can no longer be treated as a benign backwoods hobby, she said. “We’re living in a new era,” she told Seven Days. “It’s time for the sport to grow up.” If You Cut It… Wooden bridges on the trail Credit: Courtesy of Addison Press Long before mountain bikers burst onto the scene, backcountry powder hounds were blazing ski trails throughout the Green Mountains. In most cases, these were little more than small paths through trees off main trails that led to narrow, challenging glades. Cutters of “phantom trails” typically only used handsaws and loppers and kept lines narrow and inconspicuous, said David Goodman, the author of Best Backcountry Skiing in the Northeast.  Examples abound, however, of people violating these unwritten rules. In 1998, a crew from Jay Peak Resort was found to have illegally cut a trail to the summit to make it easier to ski the slope. The resort was fined and ordered to restore the area, Goodman said. In 2007, two Northeast Kingdom men using chainsaws cut a highly visible, 2,000-foot-long ski run down the face of Big Jay, not far from the resort, which was not involved. A judge ordered the men to perform community service. In a nod to its origins, the ski trail, which is still used today, is called Jailhouse Chute, Goodman said. Although many skiers maintain such “secret stashes” in the backcountry, rogue cutting of ski trails has largely given way to community-based recreational trail groups, such as Ridgeline Outdoor Collective in Rochester, that work in partnership with public land managers, Goodman said.  “The world of backcountry skiing has kind of graduated from this,” Goodman said. “They have gone legitimate.” As mountain biking took off in the state in the 1990s and 2000s, trail builders were well aware of the long tradition of rogue construction and felt justified in cutting their own trails on public land. During the 1990s, local cycling enthusiasts quietly began carving a network of trails into the steep, rocky terrain at Perry Hill in Waterbury, located at the southern tip of the C.C. Putnam State Forest, near a town sports complex. The trails grew so popular that the state couldn’t ignore the unsanctioned use any longer. In 2006, state officials struck an agreement that allowed the mountain biking to continue there but only under the close stewardship of the Vermont Mountain Bike Association. Since 2015, the Waterbury Area Trail Alliance has been responsible for maintenance of the trails. Similar agreements have multiplied across the state as mountain biking in Vermont has begun to mature in the way that backcountry skiing did years earlier.  “What happened in Nebraska Valley is an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable stage in the growth and acceptance of mountain biking along the rogue-to-regulated continuum,” Goodman said. ‘Side Quest’ Cyril Brunner Credit: Courtesy of Stowe Trails Partnership Cyril Brunner was 25 and had just returned from a trip to the Canadian Rockies when he got interested in maintaining and building mountain biking trails with friends in the Stowe area. The energy analyst was single, with boundless enthusiasm and time on his hands. When trees fell across trails after storms, he would clear them himself rather than complain or wait for someone else to do it, he told Seven Days in his first interview since being publicly named as one of those responsible for the illegal trail in Nebraska Valley. During lulls in maintenance work, he started heading up into the woods west of his home on Nebraska Valley Road on a “side quest” to create the kind of challenging trails that the region lacked, he said. Since mountain biking had gone mainstream, much of the local trail building focused on creating courses that featured wide, sweeping downhill turns, often built with mini-excavators and better suited for beginner or intermediate riders, he said. Brunner wanted to create trails in steep terrain out of reach to excavators. So he hiked up to the backcountry on the eastern flanks of the sprawling Mount Mansfield State Forest. The area, in what is known as the Burt Block, is near a popular section of the Catamount cross-country ski trail, which extends from Bolton Valley to the von Trapp Family Lodge Resort. It was not far from the Lake Mansfield Trout Club, a historic private fishing club set on a pristine mountain lake. People had so much fun on it and enjoyed it so much that we tried to bring as many people as we possibly could up there.Cyril Brunner Brunner began building the bike trail around 2016 and estimates that he put about 3,000 hours of work into it over three years. The arduous labor involved hauling lumber, hardware and tools to the site and building the trail and its features by hand. “I’m an endurance guy, so certainly that element was also kind of fun for me,” he said. Brunner conceded that building a trail in a state forest without approval was “legally, probably on the question-mark side.” But many of his friends and fellow mountain bike riders had done the same, he said, as they sought to expand trail options in the area. “I don’t want to normalize it, but in many ways there is this sort of cultural element that has kind of made this OK and accepted,” he said. Seven Days requested and obtained the state’s records about Brunner’s trail. Walter Opuszynski, the forester assigned to the area, wrote in an email that Brunner acknowledged six to 10 other riders had been involved in the trail’s construction. Brunner told Seven Days that he didn’t recall making that statement but that the number was “roughly correct.” He said he never told state officials the names of anyone else who worked on the trail. His friend Aaron Rice got drawn into the case because one day Lynn, the editor, saw Rice emerge from the forest and place a chainsaw into a pickup truck, he said. Rice is an elite powder skier from Stowe who in 2016 broke the world record for the most vertical feet climbed on skis in a year: 2.5 million. He held the record for eight years. Brunner said Rice is a good friend but rarely pitched in on the trail. Nevertheless, after Lynn shared Rice’s name with state officials, they sought to hold him accountable as well, according to emails. ‘No Strava’ Smooth, machine-built trails at Cady Hill Forest in Stowe Credit: File: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur By 2019 the trail was largely complete and Brunner gave it a name: Rage Against the Machine Built. As a finishing touch, wooden signs were posted along the route. One displayed a quote from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: “Certainty of death. Small chance of success. What are we waiting for?” Another bore the word “Strava” with a red line through it. This was meant to discourage riders from using the popular GPS-based exercise app that maps routes. A sign urging riders not to use the Strava app Credit: Courtesy of Addison Press To state officials, the sign was damning evidence that Brunner and his pals were trying to keep their trail a secret, for use only by them and their clique of riders. Opuszynski’s memo said such signs were “installed in an effort to keep this trail ‘off the grid’ and hidden from land managers and to keep the trail used by those that were ‘in the know.’” The attorney general’s complaint echoed the claim. Brunner denies that he was trying to keep his project a secret. He said he told many people about the trail and wanted it to be enjoyed widely. “People had so much fun on it and enjoyed it so much that we tried to bring as many people as we possibly could up there,” he told Seven Days. He estimated that by the time the trail was shut down in 2021, 60 to 70 riders used it each week.  Brunner was not a member of the Stowe Trails Partnership while building the trail, he said, but got involved in the organization once it was finished. Members of the group would often tell him they had ridden the trail for the first time and appreciated it, he said. He wanted it kept off Strava to prevent novice riders from taking on such a challenging course, he said. “I can say with some confidence this was probably the most technically difficult trail in the state, or at least one of them,” Brunner said. ‘Out of Control’ Aaron Rice riding in Québec Credit: Courtesy Word got out anyway. Not all riders turned off Strava, and the trail began turning up on the app.  Outdoor activity surged in Vermont during the pandemic. Mountain bikers, hikers and skiers flooded narrow Nebraska Valley Road, the upper reaches of which are unpaved, on their way to the backcountry. Lynn first alerted a state forester to the increased mountain biking activity in Nebraska Valley in October 2020. Initially, little was done. The foresters looked around in the woods behind Lynn’s house but didn’t find much, concluding that the limited Strava traffic might have been from backcountry skiers, not mountain bikers, according to Opuszynski’s memo. They also initially confused the trail Snyder discovered with another illegal trail elsewhere along Nebraska Valley Road. Lynn, frustrated by what she viewed as the state’s inaction, brought the problem to the attention of the Stowe Trails Partnership leadership and Stowe Selectboard the following June. She also noted that Brunner had begun accessing the trail through the Trout Club property. She observed that the trail’s construction seemed very similar to others built by the partnership.  “It is hard for folks not to believe that [Stowe Trails Partnership] is complicit,” Lynn wrote. Around this time, Brunner said, he began removing the bridges. But that move caught state officials off guard, and they immediately called a halt to that work until they could check out the trail in person as part of their investigation into who was responsible. In July, Lynn sent a screenshot of the Strava heat map to state officials as part of her campaign to pressure them to act. “I just wanted to make sure that this was addressed and that your agency was aware of how out of control this situation has gotten in Stowe,” she wrote. The Spill A month later, senior leaders from Forests, Parks and Recreation and representatives of the state and local trail organizations met to tour the site. Brunner, then secretary of the Stowe Trails Partnership, attended on behalf of the group. It wasn’t clear to Brunner at the time what information the state officials were trying to learn from their visit, and he had no plans to admit his role, he said. But soon after the meeting began in the small dirt parking lot at the forest entrance, state officials put him on the spot. “They clearly stated in the conversation, ‘We have people who have told us that you have been involved in this,’” Brunner recalled. “They said that pretty candidly.” The accusation hung in the air for several moments. The group fell silent. Brunner didn’t know what to say. He wanted to come clean, he recalled, but he worried about the consequences. Brunner didn’t think the foresters had any hard evidence, such as pictures of him from a trail camera, but couldn’t be sure. “Everyone was staring at me, and I was like, What do I do? Just plead the fifth?” he said. “It was so uncomfortable that I was just like, I’ve gotta admit to this.” He told FPR leaders that he had been involved in building the trail but stressed that it was before he had become an officer at the partnership.  From there, the group hiked up to the trail, reviewed what remained of the construction, and discussed removal and restoration plans. While Brunner always expected the trail would someday be discovered, he didn’t foresee the legal and financial bind he would face by admitting responsibility, he said. Aware that many legal trails in Vermont started without formal permission, he said he did not expect that the state would call for its complete erasure. At worst, he figured, officials would put signs up telling people not to ride it, as they had done across a separate trail linking Nebraska Valley Road to the Cotton Brook area. “Given that it was hardly used and was a small little thing, I was like, How can this become a big deal?” Brunner recalled. “Obviously I was wrong.” Fallout Nick Bennette Credit: File: Jeb Wallace-Brodeur The revelation that officers of two trail organizations and perhaps as many as 10 others in their orbit had been involved in the construction of an illegal trail on state land was viewed by Snyder as a profound breach of trust.  Emails suggest that state officials were subsequently unwilling to support a push for more mountain biking trails in the Brownsville area of Stowe in part because of what they called the “Nebraska Valley situation.” “That was a tough pill to swallow, honestly,” Julie Moore, secretary of the Agency of Natural Resources, told Seven Days. “It really reiterated how important it is for us to be in communication with the trail recreation partners and that they create accountability among their members.” The episode “crystallized and clarified for people” that rogue trail building, despite its long history, was no longer acceptable, said Nick Bennette, who took over as executive director of the Vermont Mountain Bike Association just two months before the state tour of the site. Snyder was particularly intent on holding the wrongdoers accountable because the trail was the second instance of extensive timber cutting he’d encountered in just a couple of years. In 2019, a New Hampshire resident with a camp in Westfield was found to have cut down 839 trees and shrubs in the adjoining Hazen’s Notch State Park. The man admitted he had done so without permission in order to build a ski trail. The case was settled in 2023, and he paid a $75,000 penalty. In the Nebraska Valley case, Snyder ordered that remaining evidence of the trail be scrupulously documented. The state’s timber trespass laws allow for fines of up to $50 per tree or shrub under six inches in diameter, with penalties rising to up to $2,000 for trees over 22 inches in diameter. Snyder wanted a precise inventory of the number and size of the trees and shrubs that had been cut. All but two of the 327 felled trees measured under six inches. The foresters’ inventory initially tallied potential fines at around $16,000. But the state law allows damages of up to triple that amount, depending on the circumstances, a spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office said. In addition to the illegal cutting, the men were also accused of unlawful mischief and civil trespass. A lot of times the pushback has been “Why do you need this trail?” and “You have enough trails.”Nick Bennette “Vermont’s state forests are a treasured resource,” Attorney General Clark said in a news release about the situation. “Protecting these public lands and ensuring their long-term stewardship with sustainable forest management is critical for the benefit of current and future generations of Vermonters and for the preservation of our natural world.” Ultimately, the state sought a joint penalty of $35,000 from the two men. Brunner, who thought the matter had been resolved in 2021, was stunned, he said, calling the settlement “a shitload of money.” He plans to pay most of it over the next two years. The civil settlement also required Brunner and Rice to remove any remaining bolts that had anchored structures such as bridges. That work was completed last month, Brunner said. Although he accepts responsibility for his actions, Brunner said, he feels “a little bitter” that he and Rice were made into public examples. Some in the mountain biking community have come to the men’s defense. Online forums are filled with commenters proposing to raise money to help pay their settlement. Steve Gagliardone, an avid mountain biker from Sharon, said the state has a well-earned reputation for burying people in paperwork when they seek to build a new trail. “I can sympathize with them not wanting to go through that process to put in a trail,” Gagliardone said. He built a modest unpermitted trail in the Downer State Forest in Sharon, and when he tried to get it legalized, state foresters told him he had to upgrade it to certain standards and get approval from five different divisions at the Agency of Natural Resources, he said. “They are certainly biased against bikes,” Gagliardone said. Bennette said his organization has been frustrated at times by how the state reviews proposed trails, including a short route through Perry Hill that was denied because of potential impact on bear habitat, he said. Sometimes it feels as if the state’s default position is to identify all the reasons not to approve something, he said.  “A lot of times the pushback has been ‘Why do you need this trail?’ and ‘You have enough trails,’” Bennette said. State officials say they have improved their processes and now provide more feedback on proposed trails up front instead of after a lengthy application process. In the end, Brunner and Rice say they agreed to the settlement in an effort to put the affair behind them. Both continue to help build legal trails in the state. Brunner, 34, volunteers with Stowe Trails Partnership, where his wife, Kenzie, is executive director. Rice, 36, is president of the Mansfield Backcountry Alliance, which works with the state to expand backcountry ski glades on state lands. Both say they understand now what they did was wrong but deny that any significant environmental damage resulted, certainly nothing compared to what logging does to state lands. This month, Seven Days visited the site of the former trail with Snyder and found it to be heavily overgrown. Snyder pointed out the remnants of bolts that had been cut flush with boulders and rocks that still lined the edges of the former trail’s downhill curves. He spotted a small pile of two-by-fours, bound with deck screws, discarded just off the trail, and took note of ruts carved into former logging roads and rocks scraped bare of vegetation — all probably caused by bikers, he said. Snyder acknowledged that the damage was not exactly an “environmental plague” but said the lingering impacts underscore why people shouldn’t undertake projects like this without permission. Rogue construction jeopardizes the relationships that the state and community trail groups have blazed, he said. He acknowledged that the steep financial penalties for Brunner and Rice were meant to deter others from cutting trails. “If you don’t want to be made an example of,” Snyder said, “don’t be an example.” ➆ The original print version of this article was headlined “Rogue Rage | Two mountain biking bros learned the hard way that Vermont no longer tolerates illegal backcountry trail building” The post Mountain Biking Case Signals Crackdown on Rogue Trail Building appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less