Mountain bike events these days have a penchant to grow, grow, grow. Before you know it, what used to be a grassroots get-together has transformed into a massive production, with festival and race entries costing hundreds of dollars.
In my opinion, expensive, overproduced events are the complete antithesis of the mountain biking ethos in a sport that began with a bunch of friends racing their mountain bikes down old dirt roads. Unfortunately, we tend to forget just how renegade and grassroots mountain biking once was.
We need to take that feeling of hanging out in the woods and riding bikes with your friends and bring it back to the festival and race scene. Thankfully, a few grassroots events across North America are doing just that. One that’s leading the charge with chill local vibes and affordable entry fees is the Salty Marie Trails Fest.
Enter the Salty Marie, a grassroots festival and race
The Salty Marie was born from the local demand for an annual mountain bike gathering. “We go to these really cool events. We go to the Marji [Gesick], and we go all over and do these really neat things, but there wasn’t really anything like that here,” said Graham Atkinson, Race Coordinator and co-founder of the Salty Marie. “We kind of all just came to the realization that it needed to be done here in town.” Atkinson, Salty co-founder Reg Peer, and the organizing committee consisting of Katie Wenham, Joel Wenham, Karen Marrocco, and Mark Jobst, decided to take notes from professional-level events while consciously hosting the festival with a very “grassroots vibe.” The festival features local vendors from Sault Ste. Marie, plenty of activities for the kids, and entertainment for family members who are hanging out and waiting at the finish line.
“We want people to come out and enjoy the spectator component of the event, as much as the riders on the course are enjoying themselves, pushing their limits,” said Atkinson. In the past, they’ve had live bands perform, and the Salty Marie had a DJ in 2025.
“We have the event arena space activated in a way to keep people entertained while they’re waiting,” said Atkinson. “Because once someone leaves the start line on a mountain bike race on singletrack, [there’s] not a lot of spectator opportunity […] until they get back, maybe two and a half to four hours later. So you have to be mindful of the spouse or the partner or the kids that are coming to watch their mom or dad or friend race. Like, they gotta have something to do in the meantime. So we try to be mindful of that.”
As I cruised through the venue after the 2025 race, I spotted the local brewery dishing out cold cans, a local restaurant flipping hot dogs and burgers, a small kids’ bike course and skills area, plenty of local vendors, and lots of friends and families just hanging out and enjoying the beautiful August weather beneath the spreading bows of the towering deciduous trees.
Low-key racing is a great way to see the trails
The Salty Marie is hosted at Hiawatha Highlands, Sault Ste. Marie’s premier mountain bike trail system with over 40 miles of purpose-built singletrack. Thanks to a massive $3.7 million CAD investment in trail development that kicked off in late 2020, this expansive network now delivers everything from gnarly rock slabs and technical enduro lines to bike park-quality jump trails. Travis Anderson, Director of Tourism and Community Development for Sault Ste. Marie, calls it “Ontario’s BC,” noting that “the slabs are long” and riders will find “the steepness that you would see in some of the networks out west… there’s nothing like it between the Rockies and Quebec.”
The trail system is divided into four distinct clusters, each offering a unique riding experience. Crystal Creek serves as the focal point of recent construction, featuring professionally-built jump lines where “we’ve got 20-plus-foot-long tabletops [and] some big step downs,” according to Anderson. The enduro trails near Farmer Lake deliver the gnar with seven technical downhill lines ranging from intermediate to expert, packed with brutal rock gardens, root webs, and steep slab rolls. For those seeking a backcountry adventure, the Farmer Lake Loop ventures deep into the wilderness where “you lose cell service,” rolling through wild northwoods terrain and connecting to multiple inland lakes. Nearby, the new Mile High Club trail showcases some of the tallest rock slab rolls in the entire system. Finally, Red Pine offers classic tight and twisty singletrack running over exposed bedrock slabs and tricky root webs.
With so many trails packed into the network, Hiawatha can be a little intimidating to navigate by yourself if you’ve never been there before. That’s exactly where the Salty’s low-pressure races come in.
The Salty’s primary race distances are 10K, 25K, and 50K, and each provides a curated tour of the best of the best at Hiawatha Highlands. With extensive course markings, officials at confusing corners, and dozens of your new best friends all out for a ride as well, it’s easy to enter one of these affordable events and get the best Hiawatha Highlands trails served up on a silver platter.
I personally raced the 50K event in 2025, and it was my first taste of mountain biking in Ontario. I was awed by the diversity of trails on display over these 31 miles. After a stretch of cross-country ski trail to spread riders out, the course dove into some of the network’s most technical old-school trails, with natural root webs, rocky climbs and descents, and plenty of up-and-over features.
From there, we pedaled into the more remote corners of the trail system, riding technical, rolling singletrack with occasional views of beautiful lakes.
Just as I thought the course designer had chosen not to route the racers through the high-speed jump trails, we looped back toward the start and dropped into Soonami — a high-speed descent filled with jumps and towering berms.
I went back and re-rode all of these trails (and more) over the following week, and I can confirm: the Salty course is a truly fantastic overview of what Hiawatha has to offer. Does it hit the steepest rock slabs, the gnarliest double blacks, and the biggest tabletop jumps? Well, no… but the trails fest also offers more casual exploratory group rides on Sunday following the main event, providing the opportunity to dive deeper into whichever portion of the expansive trail system intrigues you.
New for 2025: 200K+ Ultra
There’s something in Lake Superior’s water that breeds insane ultra-endurance athletes. The Marji Gesick is a 100-mile mountain bike race in nearby Marquette, Michigan, that’s been touted as “The hardest single-day mountain bike race in America” by renowned endurance racer Jeremiah Bishop. Many of the local hammerheads in Sault Ste. Marie travel to Marquette to race the “Marji” every year.
“One thing that we had always hoped to do was an ultra-distance event, because that’s the type of riding that a few of our core group are really interested in doing,” said Atkinson. “We’ve got some really gnarly trails and back road, off-road stuff that we ride just for fun, like in the evenings and on weekends. So the course traces those areas that we like to go to.”
The new 200K event has been dubbed the “SALTRA,” and the 2025 course measured over 128 miles and boasted over 10,700 feet (3,260 meters) of climbing. Racers departed from downtown Sault Ste. Marie at 5:30pm on Friday night and began by riding the local paved Hub Trail before winding through all of Hiawatha Highland’s trails and then heading deep into the forests north of the city. While there are some long forest road sections up north, the roads are used to stitch together stretches of rugged backcountry singletrack and cross-country ski trail that most tourists will never ride. The course finishes by winding through Hiawatha once again, and it shares a finish line with the other events on Saturday.
For the inaugural year, Atkinson required racers to apply to the Ultra event, and he limited the field to just 12 competitors. He only accepted eight racers from the applicants, but once the course was released, “two immediately back out. They were like, ‘This is too much, I’m not doing this. I’m not even gonna bother starting.'”
Of the six who started, only three racers finished. The three that DNFed all self-extracted — one local just pedaled home, and the other two said, “No, we got ourselves in this mess. We’ll get ourselves out. We’ll see you at the finish line for some beers,” according to Atkinson.
“Nobody was displeased, even though they didn’t finish,” he added. “They all came and hung out afterwards and took part in the social scene.”
The three racers who finished were Ben Alter from Marquette, MI; Brandon Zauner from Goulais River, ON; and Dan Ableson from St. Joseph Island, ON. Alter is an accomplished local ultra racer with plenty of experience in similar events. But Atkinson specifically highlighted Abelson, who’s in his early 60s and “was racing against [people] at least half his age or more.” Despite barely making most of the cut-offs, Abelson persevered and crossed the finish line right before the final cut-off time, making him just one of three people to finish this insane ultra challenge.
The 200K event was announced not long before the 2025 festival, which didn’t give most people enough time to prepare for the event. “When we finally did announce it, a whole bunch of other people came out of the woodwork, and they were like, ‘Oh, we wouldn’t have gone to this event or that event, had we known you’re doing this. We totally would have just stuck around here, or we would have come from where we were to there, and not registered for this other one,’ because there [are] a few [events] clustered around these next few weeks.”
While the SALTRA will never be a big draw for the Salty Marie, the 2026 event will likely have an even larger and more competitive field.
Start here, go there
While many riders may never race the 200K, the four primary race distances are designed to allow riders to progress and improve from year to year. “We’re trying to groom people to ride year over year into that next thing, right?” said Atkinson. Perhaps a rider will start with the 10K one year, work up to the 25K, and then finally complete a 50K. And if that isn’t enough, there’s always the craziness of a 200K overnight ultra to tempt you.
In a broader sense, the trail sampler platters offered by the Salty races may whet your appetite for the rest of what Hiawatha Highlands has to offer. “It’s the jumping off point for you to spend some more time up here and explore what we have,” said Anderson. “Because not all the trails are going to be included in the Salty — we’re going to get to a point where we’ve got a lot more trails than the 50-kilometer race.”
Anderson is right: the trail system continues to grow and change from year to year, thanks to ongoing trail building efforts. During my visit, I had the chance to ride two fantastic new additions to the network that were still being completed. And Anderson’s contractors have plenty of work lined up for the 2026 build season, too.
The low-key grassroots vibe of the Salty Mare Trails Festival lets you get out of the festival whatever you’re looking for. Whether it’s a fun event for the family to hang out at, a curated trail tour through the network, or an insane endurance challenge, the Salty delivers something for just about every mountain biker.
Registration has just opened for the 2026 event, which will be held July 24-26. Register now to reserve your spot today!
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