Sustainable Dreams

The land of the midnight sun. The great white north. A wilderness steeped in the stories of those that went before, and a place where trails created the very history of one of Canada’s northern territories. Trails that were once lined with gold are now re-shaped by Carcross/Tagish youth, who, as part of the Singletrack to Success project, are building a sustainable, community driven future.

In the late 1800s thousands of would-be gold miners flocked north after Skookum Jim scooped a nugget of gold out of a remote mountain creek.

After the gold rush and the Windy arm stampede the miners didn’t last long, leaving fractured veins and broken dreams behind them. The damage was done, and the traditional hunting grounds were irreparably damaged.

The Singletrack to Success program came to fruition in the summer of 2006, after Jane Koepke presented the Carcross/Tagish First Nation (CTFN) with an idea to draw mountain bikers to the area. The program would build trails on the sacred Montana mountain, adding to an already existing, forgotten network of mining and hunting trails.

The beauty of the proposed program was that they wouldn’t be using outside contractors to do the heavy lifting, it would be the local youth Building the future of Carcross, one trail at a time.

Working with the land, the STS program has created an accessible, backcountry experience that allows riders of all levels, on trail/enduro type bikes such as the Occam range, to quickly escape the masses below and to find themselves pinning Alpine singletrack.