The icy James. Credit: Hunter Davis

Editor’s note: Thanks to Hunter Davis for sharing these words, pics and video with us. For more from Davis, check out HomeontheJames.com

I’ve always enjoyed a good snow day.  Whether it’s outside sledding with your buddies or huddled inside, warming up with a hot meal.  Snow can give a whole new outlook to everyday life.  When I initially saw the snow forecast, excitement started to build with thoughts on how to celebrate the white stuff we rarely see here in Richmond.

My buddy Joey just got done riding the JayP’s Backyard Fat Pursuit in Idaho about a month ago.  The Backyard Pursuit is a fat bike race that covers about 120 miles in the snow around Yellowstone National Park and is incredibly challenging.  Joey completed the race on a CHUMBA Cycles URSA 29er+, in which he said performed fantastic in the snow.  Needless to say, I was curious to see Joey and the URSA take on the terrain here in RVA.  Check out SNOW DAY part 1 as Joey grabs the first tracks in Forest Hill Park after receiving six inches of snow.

After parting ways with Joey, I headed to the 14th Street Takeout to meet up with a crew of whitewater boaters.  It was time to see the city from river level – arctic style.

This is not something you see every winter in Richmond. Credit: Hunter Davis

We decided to hike out to 42nd Street Rocks to begin our descent.  Although it wasn’t easy to reach the main flow of the river due to ice, the scenery is breathtaking.  SNOW DAY part 2 documents the majority of the our trip as we navigate the falls on the James River.

I think what I enjoy most about the winter and snow is the silence that accompanies it.  A blanket of snow seems to trap the normal sounds of the city, making the park more intimate.  I hope everybody had a chance to get out and have a SNOW DAY of their own.

A bike boulevard in Palo Alto. Credit: Bikeable Richmond

Maybe you’ve heard by now that late yesterday the Richmond Planning Commission approved the long contemplated/sought/worked on/argued over Floyd Avenue Bike Boulevard proposal.

At this point, work should begin in the spring, unless City Council chooses to overrule the decision (which seems unlikely). Both the Times-Dispatch and Bikeable Richmond offer blow-by-blow details on the plan itself, so I won’t go into those here. But I do highly recommend you check out Bike Walk RVA Director Max Hepp-Buchanan’s piece on the Sports Backers’s blog. He does a great job of going behind the ins and outs of urban/traffic planning to lay out the significance of the vote and what it could mean for other projects going forward.

Bottom line, it was a good day — maybe not a perfect day, but a good day — for RVA’s bicycle infrastructure proponents.

Volunteers hard at work on Buttermilk East. Credit: Richard Chittick

Volunteers from RVAMORE and the James River Park trail builders are set to resume work on the new Buttermilk East Trail on Saturday morning. Construction on the trail began in early January, and when complete in the spring, it will connect the Buttermilk Trail from the 22nd Street tower on Riverside Drive to where the trail passes underneath the Lee Bridge.

Currently, cyclists looking to ride over to the Manchester Bridge and the Floodwall must use Riverside Drive and parts of the ramps onto the Lee Bridge. The new trail will make it possible to ride on dirt from 22nd Street directly to Railroad Avenue behind the SunTrust Building that stands guard over the foot bridge leading to the Manchester Wall overlook.

Many mountain bikers already know that this route then leads to the Manchester Slave Trail and the loop of singletrack known locally as the Poop Loop, due to it’s proximity to Richmond’s wastewater treatment plant.

More than 30 people have shown up to help with the each of first two rounds of trail construction that were done on January 10 and 17. Several hundred feet of the trail traverses a steep hill which requires significant bench cutting, and RVAMORE can use as much help as possible.

“We have a couple of connecting sections to cut in,” reads a press release sent out by the group yesterday. “There’s some bench cuts that need a little more work — perhaps a small retaining wall or two and there are a few rocks to rearrange under the [Lee Bridge].”

Those interested in helping can find out more at www.rvamore.org or simply show up to find the crew ready to go at 9 a.m. on Riverside Drive a few yards east of the 22nd Street Tower. Simply look for the JRPS work truck.

Mike Burton (front) and Greg Rollins work on Buttermilk East. Credit: Richard Chittick

Trailicious 3

Speaking of RVA MORE, their annual mid-winter party is all set to go on February 21 at Hardywood Park Craft Brewery from 6:30 to 10 p.m.

This 3rd annual event includes live music by Andrew Ali & Last Night’s Blues Band and Lucky Stiff’s. Registration is $30 and includes a pint glass and raffle ticket, featuring prizes from Riverside Outfitters, Shinecraft Vessels and Second Gear Designs.

Greg Rollins, president of mountain bike advocacy and trail building group Richmond MORE, sent me this video yesterday to share with the RichmondOutside.com readership. When I first wrote about the project featured here, it was called the “Hidden Link,” but that name was deemed too similar to the planned “Missing Link” trail that will one day connect the Manchester Climbing Wall area with the southside footbridge to Belle Isle. The new trail in the works — now called “Buttermilk East” — will parallel the future Missing Link. You’ll get a sense for the route it will take, as well as the work required to create it in this clip.

As usual, many thanks to the volunteers at Richmond MORE.

Bike Walk RVA’s ‘Bike Academy’ will train community members to advocate for new bikeways and safer streets.

I first wrote about the Sports Backers’ plans for a “Bike Walk RVA Academy” back in August. The idea, said Max Hepp-Buchanan, the SBs’ Director of Bike Walk RVA, was to create an “effective community of advocates on the ground making sure (the city’s new bike-related projects) are designed with people age 8 to 80 in mind.”

The first Academy launched on October 1, and last month the first class of 20 community bike/walk advocates graduated. The response to the program was so positive that the Sports Backers announced yesterday they’ll be re-launching the Bike Walk RVA Academy in February.

“The Autumn 2014 program received 65 applications for 20 available spots,” said Hepp-Buchanan. “We couldn’t possibly accept everyone we wanted in the first round of the program, so we’ve decided to expedite the re-launch of the Bike Walk RVA Academy in Richmond. We want to take this unique opportunity to develop as many effective advocates for walking and biking infrastructure in the city before moving the program into the surrounding counties this fall.”

The Bike Walk RVA Academy is an eight-week program designed to develop passionate advocates in Richmond into on-the-ground leaders in the movement for comfortable and connected walking and biking infrastructure. Participants will be empowered with the tools, knowledge, and confidence to effectively advocate for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure projects in their neighborhoods that allow everybody to get where they need to go on foot or by bike.

The Bike Walk RVA Academy aims to train and equip community leaders. Credit: Sports Backers

“With the final draft of the City’s Bicycle Master Plan coming out soon, and now with talk of a bike share program in Richmond, we need strong voices in our communities,” explained Hepp-Buchanan. “You shouldn’t have to be strong and fearless to ride a bike or walk to places you need to go on a regular basis.”

Beginning on February 25, 2015, the Bike Walk RVA Academy will meet once a week and wrap up by the end of April. People of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities are encouraged to apply.

The Bike Walk RVA Academy is offered free of charge, but entry into each program is competitive. Applications for both programs are now being accepted through January 30. Full workshop schedules, more information, and the online applications can be found at www.sportsbackers.org.

If you’re a James River Park System user, you might already know about the Friends of the James River Park and the regular newsletter they send out. It’s full of valuable information and volunteer opportunities for park lovers. I wanted to highlight the lead item in their most recent newsletter because it offers some updates on a topic I’ve covered before.

Volunteers from the James River Hikers at the new Texas Beach boardwalk in the JRPS. Credit: Dennis Bussey

Back in early September, I wrote about the sky-high usage numbers that park Superintendent Nathan Burrell found when he pulled the data from the newly-installed infrared and electronic counters. “Up through July,” Burrell said at the time, “we were at 500,000+ visitors. That’s May through July. And we only have counters at seven locations right now.”

Well, now the Friends of the JRP newsletter is reporting that the park saw “795,117 visitors from May 2014 until the end of October 2014.” Extrapolating from that now rather large data set suggests that by May 2015 the JRPS will see well over 1 million users and probably closer to 1.5 million.

Here’s some perspective: In February the Times-Dispatch reported that Maymont was the “most-visited place in the Richmond area,” with 527,153 visitors in 2013. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was second with 479,907 visitors. Rounding out the top five were the Children’s Museum of Richmond with 393,529 visitors; Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden with 339,139 visitors; and Henrico’s Three Lakes Nature Center and Aquarium with 304,621 visitors.

The Washington Redskins training camp brought in 164,789 visitors this year. Needless to say, the Redskins, with their tax breaks and sweetheart deals, don’t offer the city what the JRPS does in one or two summer months.

The James River Park has always been a popular place. We now know how popular.

And keep this in mind too, as I wrote in September, “The JRPS with it’s 1 million or more visitors a year is maintained by four full-time employees (including Burrell), two seasonal employees and one part-timer.” Note to the mayor and city council: That’s crazy!

And the Friends’ newsletter also reports that the park “provides a huge economic benefit to the City. Using the $16 per day per user estimate for park economic impact numbers from the 2014 edition of the Virginia Outdoors Plan, JRPS right now, provides a $12,721,872 economic impact directly to the City and local businesses.”

Local mountain bike and trail-building outfit RVA-MORE has a video on their YouTube channel (featured above) that gives you a sense of the difficulty of trail building in an urban environment like Richmond’s. Steepness and inaccessibility of the terrain, erosion and high-use issues and private property concerns, all make the existence of trails like Buttermilk, North Bank (where the video was shot) and others, physically and logistically improbable. The fact that all us mountain bikers, trail runners, dog walkers, birders, etc. get to enjoy the fruits of labor like that seen above, is a pretty amazing thing. One that makes Richmond special. So, hats off to the volunteers, and Richmond’s city-run trail crew, for all they do.

After seeing the video earlier today, I noticed this line in a post on the RVA MORE Facebook page: “The sooner we finish this, the sooner we can get into building some new trail to connect Buttermilk to the Floodwall.”

I hadn’t heard about a new connector from Buttermilk to the Floodwall, so I gave RVA More President Greg Rollins a call. He said the new trail segment — dubbed the “Hidden Link,” which is not to be confused with the planned “Missing Link” trail closer to the water — is designed to bring mountain bikers from the top of the 22nd Street tower (22nd Street and Riverside Drive) to the “SunTrust Tower,” i.e. across the train tracks from the top of the Manchester Climbing Wall, keeping them in wooded singletrack the whole time. This connection now is ridden mostly on sidewalk and road. Rollins said this connector is especially key with construction on the Brown’s Island Dam Walk set to begin any day.

“The idea is to have that open once trail (work) season is finished and have that be a viable corridor,” he said. “We’ve looked at it only from afar and on maps. The corridor looks doable, it’s just got a lot of briars. I think there’s a hobo camp or two in there.”

Click here to learn more about RVA MORE and trail building in Richmond, or to find out how you can volunteer.

Back in October, Richmond City Council passed a resolution adopting a “Complete Streets Policy.” As RVA News reported recently, the resolution puts city officials on the hook to create and implement guidelines that’ll ensure future transportation improvement projects will be planned, designed, and constructed with pedestrians, bicyclists, and transit passengers in mind, in addition to motorists…City officials now have one year to create those implementation guidelines, which will be included in the City’s construction standards manual.

Bike lane approaching the MLK Bridge near VCU. Credit: Phil Riggan

This talk of a Complete Streets Policy reminded me that the city is also working on a Bike Master Plan, something that I feel like has been referred to in news reports as “almost complete” for a long time. So I gave Jakob Helmboldt a call for an update. Helmboldt is the Bicycle, Pedestrian and Trails Coordinator for the city, and he’s the one, I figured, who’d be knee deep in the bike master plan. Helmboldt explained that the Bike Master Plan is actually “being done as kind of an appendix to the strategic multi-modal transportation plan” that was completed over a year ago by the city. The multi-modal plan had some vague bike stuff in it, but the Bike Master Plan was created as a change order to that plan and is really intended to get into specifics for bike infrastructure and planning in the city.

Helmboldt had just received a draft of the plan from transportation planning consultant, Alta, and was making edits, additions and subtractions. So in one sense, the plan really is almost done. But it’s also part of the multi-modal plan, which Helmboldt said won’t go through official adoption process until sometime next year.

The good news is that while the Bike Master Plan won’t become official until next year, it’s already guiding public works decisions.

“To a degree there’s been sort of a parallel process,” Helmboldt said. “We’ve already been identifying some key corridors that we needed to start aiming for, started getting some of the design work done. So, the Manchester Bridge, the Lee Bridge are pretty much 90 percent planned for — getting those re-striped and marked for buffered bike lanes. There’s been this process where we filtered out some things that we knew we’d be moving forward on because we obviously didn’t want to wait for this process to be wrapped up.”

A complete street approach in Stockholm, Sweden.

You can see that in the new bike lanes on Forest Hill Avenue, Brookland Parkway and the Martin Luther King Bridge. Helmboldt also stressed that the Bike Master Plan won’t be just a snapshot of what Richmonders want right now.

“This is a living document. Because it’s aimed at infrastructure stuff, it’s gonna be a roadmap toward implementation. Every five years we’ll go in and update it.”

For example, he said, the arrival of Stone Brewing, “that’s providing a bit of an impetus for the Gillies Creek Greenway, which was conceived from the bike/ped trails commission back in 2010. With Stone going in right there, that’s right at the southern terminus of the greenway and that connects right into the Virginia Capital Trail. So (Stone) could potentially spur development of that.”

“As these opportunities come up we start putting those things into action.”

Bottom line: The Bike Master Plan isn’t done, but it’s very much alive and guiding Richmond’s next steps toward greater bike/ped friendliness.

A rider navigates the Buttermilk Trail, part of the ride course for the ‘King of the James.’ Credit: Megan Davis

When Hunter Davis and Joey Parent finally decided to put on — after many years of talking about it — a run-bike-paddle triathlon on the James River and the trails around it, they didn’t expect all that much. They figured they’d get friends and friends of friends and maybe a few other assorted river lovers to enter. But now, less than 48 hours from the start of the first King of the James event, Davis said he thinks as many as 100 people, some who’ll do the race solo and others in the relay format, could show up Saturday morning at the start line (Reedy Creek entrance to the James River Park).

“I was expecting much less,” Davis said. “I only bought 75 t-shirts. I’m going to have to get some more. It got really big, really quick.”

For more on the race — including a look at the course map — check out the RichondOutside.com post from a couple of weeks ago. The only thing that’s different from when that piece was written, is that now racers must pay a $5 insurance fee. Click here for more on that.

But the King of the James isn’t the only area celebration of outdoors recreation this weekend. I regularly speak with mountain bikers who have no idea that a short(ish) drive out into Goochland County some sweet trails reside at the Boy Scout Camp Brady Saunders near Maidens. Well, if you’re one of those mountain bikers, this weekend would be a great time to discover those trails. Click here for the Facebok event page and all the details, but here’s the bottom line: Sierra Nevada beer garden opens at at 11:30 a.m.; rides start at noon, including guided rides for women; Intergalactic Taco Truck will be on hand selling tacos and burritos; local bike shops and vendors will have bike demos; and the Virginia Off Road Series (VORS) awards ceremony will take place, as well.

Pretty sweet, right? Heck, if you were feeling frisky, you could do the King of the James in the morning, then head of to the Scout Camp Trail Festival in the afternoon. As usual in the fall, it’s shaping up to be a good weekend for outdoors lovers in the RVA.