Marcus Tillman is the “trail guru” that keeps Coldwater Mountain in Anniston running strong

Behind the scenes, it takes a lot of planning and hard work to keep a massive trail network like Coldwater Mountain in great shape. That responsibility falls to Marcus Tillman, who works with the Northeast Alabama Bicycle Association and the city of Anniston as Recreation Trails Director for Coldwater Mountain. Today we’ll hear from Marcus about what it takes to maintain such a large system, what’s involved, and what’s in store for riders in the coming months.

In this episode we ask:

• What does a recreation trails director aka “trail boss” do on a day-to-day basis?
• How much maintenance is involved in keeping up a trail system the size of Coldwater Mountain?
• Are you able to rely on volunteers to accomplish a significant amount of the work?
• Can you give us a little history of Coldwater Mountain and how the trail system came to be?
• What’s one thing you wish riders knew that would make your job easier?
• For an experienced rider visiting Coldwater for the first time, what route do you recommend?
• How are you preparing the trails for the big Lifetime race happening in October?
• How do you ensure trails are safe and that emergency services have access to the trails?
• Coldwater is open to e-bikes. Have you had any issues with speeding, user conflicts, or trail impact?

An automated transcript is provided below.

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Automated transcript

Jeff Barber 0:00
Hey everybody, welcome to the Singletracks podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Barber, and today we’re heading to the southeast to talk about one of the biggest mountain bike trail systems in Alabama, and a true destination for riders across the region, Coldwater Mountain in Anniston, Alabama, with dozens of miles of purpose built trails coldwater has become a cornerstone for the local riding community and a magnet for visitors behind the scenes, it takes a lot of planning and hard work to keep a network like this in great shape. That responsibility falls to Marcus Tillman, who works with the Northeast Alabama Bicycle Association and is the Recreation Trail director for coldwater mountain. Today, we’ll hear from Marcus about what it takes to maintain such a large system, what’s involved and what’s in store for riders in the coming months. Marcus, welcome to the podcast.

Marcus Tillman 0:52
It’s great to be here, man. It’s good to see you, Jeff.

Jeff Barber 0:56
To start, I believe your unofficial title is trail boss at Coldwater Mountain. Is that right?

Marcus Tillman 1:02
That that is, I think there’s a trail boss for every trail system that I’ve ever been affiliated with, whether you’re in Florida or Washington. Yeah, I like to call myself trail guru. That’s my kind of My call sign. That’s my password for almost everything.

Jeff Barber 1:24
And you’re sharing that with everybody now, but, yeah, cool. So what exactly I mean? You mentioned that a lot of trails have that, that role, that responsibility, of trail boss. What does a trail boss do on a daily, day to day basis?

Marcus Tillman 1:42
Other than being grumpy and busting people for tearing the trails up?

Jeff Barber 1:45
Yeah, yeah. And we’ll get into that. I want to, I want to, I want to hear the dirt. But yeah, what’s the day to day like?

Marcus Tillman 1:51
Well, you know, I can’t remember I saw it or read it or heard it on a podcast. Is that every trail boss, trail director, trails are, whatever you want to call them. It’s almost like they have the same personality. They work hard, they took an interest in this, in the sport, and they’re kind of a giving heart, a service heart, and that is a common theme of everyone. Not all are grumpy.

Jeff Barber 2:19
They don’t start out that way.

Marcus Tillman 2:22
Well, you know, I’m a pretty nice guy. Yeah, some people have probably called me grumpy, you know, it’s when I see somebody doing something silly or kind of stupid, you know, I might, I will say something. Now, I used to probably not say something to them, but, you know, now it’s just so important to me. I’m like, you know that’s going to create an erosional issue.

Jeff Barber 2:46
Yeah, so your position, though, maybe, which is a little unique from other clubs. It’s a paid position, right? So how did that come to be and how does that work out?

Marcus Tillman 2:56
Well, you know, coldwater was not always here in 2010 2011 when we invited trail solutions to come in. And it was actually through, through Sorbo we had just joined Sorbonne. Tom suarette saw this piece of property and and he, it was actually kind of his thought process to begin cold water. So as most trail systems, volunteers do it. Anniston is a fairly small town, about 20 22,000 people. The county only has about 115 120 so it’s a pretty, pretty remote area. And I mean, and, and honestly, the next five counties around us don’t add up to 150 more 1000 people. Wow. So volunteering was, was tough, but we all saw the potential. You know this when we brought in rich Edwards and his team, Joey Klein, Chris K Meyer, all the all the big dogs with trail solutions. At the time, they laid out a conceptual plan approaching 100 miles. Wow. It was, it was really in the 70s and 80s. But then as as the Forever wild land trust bought more in holdings, we saw the potential for for more, more trails. Wow. So you said we had dozens. We actually have 56 Yeah, ish, yeah, within, within a half mile. Wow. And then, of course, across town, with McClellan, has 18, yeah. So we at 35 miles, we realized that a volunteer crew probably couldn’t do it. And if we, if we reached any potential of getting to that 100 miles, we were going to need a paid crew. And, you know, Walmart and Bentonville was beginning to set a standard for a paid trail crew, yeah. So we’re like, well, we probably can’t do it on that scale, but let’s, let’s see what we can do. So we spoke to the city. Leaders of Anniston, and they they were in agreement. You know, cycling the sunny King criterium had been here for a number of years. They saw a lot of potential for tourism dollars. And you saw a lot of bikes, mountain bikes on the back of cars. Yeah. So they saw it. They got it. They weren’t anti cycling and now anti outdoors. So they voted to create my position Recreation Trail director. And like we discussed before the podcast, it was, you know, where do you where do you put this guy? You know, where do you put this position? And you know, I’m not in the street department. And technically, this is not a park, it’s not city owned, but that’s kind of the closest thing they had. Oh, wow. So I’m in the Parks and Recreation Department. I do have a supervisor, and he answers to the Parks and Rec director, and sometimes I deal directly with the Parks and Rec director, because, I mean, these, these people don’t really ride, but they see, they see the usefulness of it, yeah, and I really attacked my position with with passion. So, you know, I had zero tools. Now, I got a truck and a trailer and all the hand tools, and then I got a UTV and then, most recently, I was purchased an excavator, a mini X, wow, wow. So that sits on top of the mountain, and then a track dumper, you know? So it’s, it’s a momentum thing, yeah, and I’m really digging it. How long have you been doing it? Well, we started. They hired me technically June of 2018 Okay, so the discussions for this position probably started in the 2016 area. 2017 takes a while.

Jeff Barber 6:50
Yeah. What were you doing before? Were you just like a very enthusiastic volunteer?

Marcus Tillman 6:55
Well, I’ve reinvented myself a few times. Okay, so I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Alabama in a little town called Bayou La Batre, and I never wanted to be a shrimper. I did that one time, and I was like, No, not for me. I was going to be a supply boat captain for the oil rigs, and I really was going to pursue that. I pushed it pretty hard, and my dad sat me down, and he’s like, you know, son, those those guys have a tough life. They’re gone all the time. You’ll never see your kids, yeah, why don’t we look at going to college? And I looked at him and I said, Well, I graduated six months ago, and I’ve never taken a college prep course. So the I went in, I sat down for the A CT, and made just good enough, and got got a degree in business management accounting, actually tried that for a year and a half. And anybody who knows me would be shocked to think that I would sit in an office all day long and look at numbers.

Jeff Barber 7:55
Yeah, we should. We should mention too at this point we’re sitting outside like we’re at the trailhead.

Marcus Tillman 8:00
We are, yeah, in this great, yeah, and it’s the you’re you’re out here every day, yeah, of course, in starting in what, June probably, you know, you almost melt when you’re outside. Yeah? So I got that degree and did not like it, so I went back to the campus at South Alabama and just looked at anything, you know, what can I do? And I liked people, and then I jumped into the restaurant business. And I did. I worked for a company called Piccadilly for 16 years. And then cafeteria, yeah, cafeteria, yeah, they’re based in Baton Rouge, so that was close by, and they opened at 11. They closed at 830 no alcohol. If you’re going to be in a restaurant business, that’s not a bad gig, right? And they had a pretty good projection on, you know, if you do these things, you’ll move up, and you’ll be a manager this day, and that’s, that’s really good. And then they filed bankruptcy, and I had my own place for eight years, and I don’t, do not recommend that. It’s good way to lose all them, all your money, yeah, and we did, so kind of had to punt after we closed the restaurant in 2011 one of my regular customers was a car dealer, and I, he asked me if I wanted to come work for him. And I never sold stuff, but I’m I like people, and I like talking, yeah. So that that servant’s heart, it goes back to that I was very successful at that made more money than I never, ever made in my life, really? Yeah, so my mom got sick, and I was like, well, I need to take care of her. So I spent a few years taking care of my mother, and then we had an elderly friend who had was a customer, and basically I worked for them. And. Remodeled homes with a friend and painted and just did whatever, yeah, and worked on the trails.

Jeff Barber 10:07
And were you a rider, or were you more into the trail maintenance side of it?

Marcus Tillman 10:11
I got into riding to keep my legs in shape for snow skiing. Oddly enough, growing up on the coast, I’d never seen a snowflake, but I’m a snow skier. A friend I grew up with was in station in Montana, and I fell in love with the mountains and with skiing, and so the salt water was no longer going to be in my veins. I was going to be a mountain person from then on. But in the mid 90s, I got into the cycling and racing immediately, you know, it’s, it’s that kind of person, you know, it’s fairly, fairly competitive. You know, my first big race was the 24 hours of Canaan, that was in 96 I think, and loved it. I loved the people, you know, it was crazy, because that’s that, that back then it was in June, and I can still remember my my first night lap, climbing to the top of Timberline lift, and it was snowing on me. So it’s leaded, and then it snowed and and, and I just, I loved it. I mean, we raced in sweatshirts. And, I mean, it was just total beginner, newbie, you know, just, I had nothing that cyclists would have now, the wool, yeah, there. So, you know, if you can, if you can love that. As the trails, of course, the trails were terrible, you know, and the bikes were terrible. Yeah, that was a good match. So as things improved, you know, now it’s great. So I was riding a lot, and then liked working on the trails. I’d always worked on the trails. The guy who got me into it was across the street there in Virginia. I lived in Virginia at the time, and he, he said, Well, if you’re going to ride the trails, you’re going to work on the trails. And I’m like, okay, I’m good with that. So, you know, no dig, no ride. Yeah, you know that’s an unpopular statement nowadays, but you know it’s there.

Jeff Barber 12:20
It’s certainly a common idea.

Marcus Tillman 12:23
Well, we’ve spoiled our new riders. So it’s a lot of the people who’ve gotten into this board in the last probably eight to 10 years. You know the trails were here? Yeah, the government helped with their grants or whatever. Helped build them. Nobody had to go out here. We paid guys a lot of money to build the trails and design them, and then now there’s a guy that’s paid to maintain them, so they just want to come out and ride. And you can’t hardly blame them. The trails are here. I actually have a couple of them that feel so guilty they make donations.

Jeff Barber 13:00
There’s a donation box here.

Marcus Tillman 13:03
It’s, ‘I’m not coming out, not helping, not picking up a rake, but I’ll give you 100 bucks. How about that?’

Jeff Barber 13:09
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, what is the, what is the need at this point for a trail system like Coldwater? I mean, you’re, this is your full time thing?

Marcus Tillman 13:19
Well, one guy, yeah, you’re one guy. I’m one guy of 56 miles. And this year was the first year that I actually designed and built trails. I built the the two mile Leadville Express, the the exit for the Leadville race that takes you into town, okay? And then we, we’ve got another Trailhead that’s in a community called Glen Addie. That’s, it’s, it’s, you know, connects you to the ladaga Trail. Okay, so we’re actually now connected to the infrastructure via dirt trails, because I went in and designed and built those trails.

Jeff Barber 13:53
What was there before? I mean, was it just woods?

Marcus Tillman 13:57
Just woods. And it was, you know, there was a housing project there had, you know, had the issues that housing projects have, and it was torn down maybe three years ago, okay, before it’s now just a grassy field, you know, it’s, it covers a couple of blocks. And then the community center that serviced that community was remodeled as as a clinic, as a for, I reckon, financially challenged people. It’s called the Dr David Satcher clinic. David Satcher was the surgeon, Surgeon General, and he grew up in Anniston, okay, and so the the far south overflow parking is now kind of our Trailhead. It’s gonna it’s gonna have a kiosk, it’s gonna have a map.

Jeff Barber 14:49
That’s a different one from the existing Anniston Trailhead.

Marcus Tillman 14:53
Yes, and most people don’t know that it’s there. It’s actually now on Google. I don’t know who loaded that up. Uploaded everything else. I didn’t load that, huh? But it’s, it’s the Dr David Satcher trailhead, and it is typical for cold water. You get out of your car, you’re climbing immediately. You know.

Jeff Barber 15:11
Which I prefer. I mean, the main trailhead, where we are right now is, is up at the top, and this was the first one that was built, yes, yeah, but that makes it tough, because you you have a lot of fun, you go downhill, and then you don’t realize how tired you are to have to get back up to your car.

Marcus Tillman 15:26
Well, you’re right now you can cheat, you know. Now the climb is if you do Bomb Dog, right? So if you like to do Bomb Dog…

Jeff Barber 15:35
Which everybody does, especially your first time.

Marcus Tillman 15:38
Yes, yeah, you almost have to do it. It’s the iconic trail. It’s kind of what we’re known for. And it was redone Flow Motion. Brought in a young man named trace, and I can’t think of his last name. He was out of North Carolina. He’s been involved with a lot of this stuff. Once it’s in Pisgah, old Ford. Yeah, I think he’s right. The g5 collective trails, he’s done a lot of stuff for them, the dirt work for them. I think he did a pretty good job. You know, that anytime I go in to disturb one of our iconic trails, whether it’s Bomb Dog or Hare or Goldilocks, you know, I’m pretty nervous. Yeah, you know, it’s, you know, the guy I know, the people who designed it and built it, and, you know, I can’t tote their water, so, yeah, it’s a it’s pretty nerve wracking.

Jeff Barber 16:30
So why do you go in there for maintenance?

Marcus Tillman 16:35
It’s a very rocky, sandy soil here. So you do have erosion, I mean, so I try to mitigate erosion by by opening up the drains and blatant stuff out, nicking things out with with with hand tools. But, you know, you have a pile of rocks that used to be a nice, fun roller, and now it’s just a pile of rocks, and it doesn’t make any sense.

Jeff Barber 16:58
And so that just happens over time? I mean, I think you know, when trails were first being built, or maybe they weren’t even built. They were just, we were riding old hiking trails, and there wasn’t a lot of thought put into erosion and how that was going to wear. And then we logging roads. Yeah? That have a water bar, right? Water bottles launching right, go airborne, yeah? But now, you know, we’ve gotten to the point where there are things you can do to design the trail, to make it more sustainable and make sure that it drains and you don’t have as many erosion issues. But you’re never going to get rid of that, right?

Marcus Tillman 17:32
What did rich Edwards say? He said it’s, it’s a sustainable trail. It’s not maintenance-free,.

Jeff Barber 17:42
Yeah, unless we pave it. And then people, people hate that.

Marcus Tillman 17:45
You know what I was that just shocked my whole conscience, you know, yeah, kind of coming up through the type of trails I rode, yeah. And then when I went to Bentonville, you know, the the trails that I session the most…

Jeff Barber 17:59
…were paved. Yeah, they’re a lot of fun to ride.

Marcus Tillman 18:02
They were, they were pretty darn fun, you know, lots of grip, and we could do this, you know, in places. It’s because, you know, cold water is, you know, we have McClellan. We built McClellan. I think it was six years ago. We started the design of that. So it’s been open five so it really hasn’t gone through the erosion.

Jeff Barber 18:23
And that was designed to be more like a NICA course?

Marcus Tillman 18:25
It is a purpose built NICA. The loop is and now we have gone in and put some blues in there and some more challenging some trails. But it just hasn’t experienced the erosion, of course, that coldwater has. But if you come to Coldwater, the expectation is you know how to ride your bike, and I don’t mean getting on your bike and pedaling across the parking lot. That’s not what I’m talking about. You understand. You know bike body separation. You know your limitations as far as your aerobic capacity, because you know, most people don’t realize you come to Coldwater, and there is no traversing, very little traversing. You know, this is the baby bear trail. It’s one mile. You get off it, you’re either going down or up, and you to get to the start of bomb dog from this parking lot. Is a five mile climb. So it you you need to understand, you know, what can I do? I don’t want to get into dire straights, yeah, so shifting, braking, and if you you hit any of these features at speed, you probably should have a good understanding of what it feels like to be airborne, yeah, even if it’s for a half second, you know, or one second you know. You can dead sail or anything. So a true beginner to come out to Coldwater, unless they’re just a Tasmanian devil and just, you know, they want, they love, to have them the you know, heck scared out of them. It’s unpleasant. It. It can be disconcerting.

Jeff Barber 20:03
It’s not the place to bring a friend who’s never ridden before.

Marcus Tillman 20:07
Unless you don’t want to know your friend anymore. You take them to McClellan, and they and they’ll they’ll enjoy themselves. And you know it’s wider, it’s a much lower slope. You know the trail Cassidy, which if you climb, if you’re going to ride bomb dog, you have to climb Cassidy. It’s a 7% average grade, yeah, and I don’t think I realized how steep it was till I was out there redoing it. I call it heavy touch up, you know, with an excavator. Yeah, there are several, you know, probably 15 degree pitches, wow, that are, yeah, they’re not long, you know, 50 feet, you know, but one after the other, after the other, after the other, yeah, you don’t realize it as you’re riding that until you get on it.

Jeff Barber 20:49
Yeah. It’s a lot of work out here. And so one of the things I wanted to ask about, too, is, I’ve noticed there is a lot of, like, there’s emergency stuff out here, right? So there’s, like, markings for access, so if there is somebody gets into trouble, there’s also at least one, maybe more water stations where you’ve got water out there. Three, three, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell us about that. I mean, have there been issues over time with people?

Marcus Tillman 21:19
Well, actually, when the city manager was talking to me about the job, he said, You know, I don’t, I don’t ride, but one of the issues we’ve had is, is emergency response. You know, we have station two for the Anniston Fire Department. Is where the mountain rescue equipment resides. Okay? It’s like a 50 foot trailer. Couple of UTVs, one has as a gurney. They, I think they just recently purchased some E bikes. But, you know, in 2012 we had our first big wreck when we went, and I won’t give her name, I was like the A year after broken humerus, ooh, you know, compound, and it took several hours to get to her and get her off the mountain, wow. So they realized they had a problem, yeah. So they began to train more and so, and you rock on and there, there are some old road beds here and there, some of them are, they’re, they’re logging roads. There are some quarry roads. This, this mountain has been used off and on since, you know, we’ve been here for 150 more years. So I, I decided that the city manager wanted me to help the fire department in their response time, and that’s one so I began to kind of ride these roads and I clear them. I cleared them with a chainsaw, and as I was driving them, I would have either Strava or some one of the GPS apps rolling, same with the trails. And so we formed a map, okay? And this map can be overly is overlaid with GIS data, with the trails, and so we rich and his crew had given each one of these service roads a number, so it’s an R number, so it’s not going to be confused with the trails. So there’s, you know, r9 and our 1914, whatever. So I made signs and put all of that up. And then, then I started working with the fire department. So station three or station two has three, three man teams. They rotate as their their shift. So I keep trying to keep them trained. Of course, the tracing happens. So then I made them their own map, so they have a map with all of the rescue roads and the trails, okay? And one of their ideas was to come up with some numbers to identify where you could be on the Yeah, which. And there’s no defined distance between the numbers they each one, though, is a is a address in the 911 system, huh? Okay, so there’s a little device called a Trimble unit. You walk up, you stand next to the post, and you triangulate with five satellites. It loads into the system, and then it’s, it’s produced and sent to the Calhoun, Calhoun County, 911 mapping, mapping system, huh? So that that gives them an idea of where you are. And I can tell you that CWM 125 is the first mandatory rock roll on bomb dog, okay? And just past there is the first triage area.

Jeff Barber 24:38
Is that the most popular? Do you have data on that, like, where most of the calls are coming from?

Marcus Tillman 24:43
There’s a lot of people who crash there. You know, it’s there. It’ll, especially when we had more cross country geometry bikes today, hit it, and it’s not, not too bad. You know, things rake back, and you can, kind of, you have dropper post, yeah, big, wide bars. Yes, but almost every year when I’m planning that area up, I blow it because it’s in the landing. It’s just, it just piles leaves. There’s always bike parts, there’s Garmins and water bottles.

Jeff Barber 25:12
There are multiple Garmins?

Marcus Tillman 25:17
There’s, let’s see they’re brake levers. You know, brake levers break and a crash. You know, there’s helmet parts, you know, it’s, it’s really pretty, pretty. It’s amazing. We haven’t had anybody really hurt too bad there. Yeah, that’s collarbones and ribs and concussions and, you know, and a broken arm here and there. The only trauma that we’ve had. We’ve had six of them is off the trail called Oval Office.

Jeff Barber 25:46
That one’s kind of remote. I feel like it’s harder to get to.

Marcus Tillman 25:50
Well, as the trail develops, and it’s because it’s as far east as you can go, Yeah, but now, you know, we’re trying to kind of develop that area. And I call Oval Office the old man jump line. You know, it’s, it’s not ramped up like these new these new hits. You know, you can hit it at 20 miles an hour, and you’re in the air, and it’s like, whoo. You’re not very far up. Yeah. But, you know, when it we first opened, it was, it was an oddity. We had no jump lines here, really, at Coldwater, so you would be out riding on a cross country basically flow trail system. And then all of a sudden you have this really wide jump line. Then it would, kind of, it would kind of lure you in, because the first set is just rollers and some some doubles and yeah, and then you, you make that turn. And, you know, Randy Spangler was the guy who, he went in and built it for us. And he, he lined, he put three tables in there, yeah. And it’s that’s been, that’s been disaster for some some riders.

Jeff Barber 26:52
And I feel like not many people get out there too. So if, if you’re out there and you have a problem, I mean, you might not have a friend with you, or nobody’s gonna come for a while.

Marcus Tillman 27:04
Well, nobody, if you’re unconscious, right? But if you can call, and if you’re, if you’re smart, you know, you have that thing set so that it calls 9110, yeah, automatically.

Jeff Barber 27:16
Do you get a lot of those calls? Do you know if the rescue folks do?

Marcus Tillman 27:20
The rescue folks do, and actually that, as the crow flies, that’s the closest trail to station two. They can almost see you. Oh, wow, if they walked outside the door. So the access there is pretty easy. You open a gate and you go up a power line, you turn into onto the trail, and it’s wide enough that their buggies, they can drive right to you. And that’s that’s really unusual, like in Pisgah, they can’t get to you on a lot of those things, right? Could be hours. So here’s, here’s the next part of the training and the maps and the grid sheet. And I put, I made a grid sheet recommending, if a rider is here, you take the trailer to this location, open the gate, the gate code is this, and you take this road to this road, and they’ll be up there on the right, yeah. So that grid sheet is on their map. It’s recommendations for them. Our goal is 30 minutes from the time the 911, dispatch calls them. They want they need to be standing over you, yeah, in 30 minutes. Okay? And the explanation is, you know, we’ve never, we’ve never had a complaint about the firefighters once they got there, right? But we have had some people who crashed, and it’s an hour and a half, yeah, that’s a long time scary laying in the dirt. You know, sometimes you’re bleeding. You’re almost always bleeding something, something maybe not, you know, bad, but you got contusions that hurt everything starting to thump. You know, a broken bone is now just, it’s just almost, you can’t always stand it. So that’s the explanation I give to the firefighters when I go in for their training, is, you know this person? I know you had two a year. You have two last year. You know you had six. You know, I know it doesn’t happen often, but you know, it’s not a burning building. You know, you’re not gonna have to dress up and go in and put your life in on the line, but that person laying in the dirt, you know, you’re their lifeline. Yeah, because you know how mountain bikers are, we’re so stubborn, like, oh well, that arm’s just hanging there. I think I can walk on out. You know, if they’ve called you, they’re in trouble, right?

Jeff Barber 29:42
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, for me, I’m a pretty cautious writer, but the the area where I get in trouble is I don’t always have enough water, or I’ll run out of water unexpectedly and and this is a place that is, it can get hot in the summer, for sure. You. And even here, you know, we’re sitting at the trailhead, there’s no there’s no running water here.

Marcus Tillman 30:04
No, Forever Wild, they kind of frown on that. And it’s funny, because you drive through Anderson Water Department property until that last turn right down there, yeah. So I was going to get to that. I’m I get I get sidetracked. So the firefighters began to have calls, especially during covid. You know, we didn’t shut this down. So we had people from Florida and Georgia, Tennessee. A lot of people came here, and then you had a lot of local people just wanting to get out of the house. Well, even though we have pretty good maps, they make a wrong turn, yeah, and they’re, they’re out on the mountain.

Jeff Barber 30:45
Maps are great, but a lot of people don’t know how to read topo maps. I feel like you don’t realize…

Marcus Tillman 30:53
We chose not to include topo lines on the map. But there’s big hill lines on our map that that are on the mountain. And of course, you know, trail forks. It’s very, very good. I’m an admin with trail forks, so it’s updated almost immediately every time we have something. But anyway, the firefighters came to me and said, you know, we have a lot of people, and they’re there. They don’t have water. Is there any thing that you can do to help us with that? And I’m like, Well, I think so I’ve been eyeballing a couple of these boxes, and they’re in a recycle pile there at the motor pool. So I pulled them out and cleaned them up, paying them green stenciled water on them. And I would just, I grab some from the club, I’d go buy some myself, and now Patrick Wigley at wigs wheels and Clint and Brooklyn Payne from coldwater camping cabins have stepped up. They provide the water that you see at these water boxes. And they’re kind of strategically placed, you know? They’re, they’re not at the bottom of the hill, right?

Jeff Barber 31:58
That makes sense. Yeah, you want it at the top climb.

Marcus Tillman 32:02
So and then Southern Traverse is our new trail. It was built really to give us the full loop for the Linville race. But, you know, it’s, it has a lot of purposes. So it’s so remote, it’s nine miles long just by itself. It’s on the south facing side.

Jeff Barber 32:21
And it’s called traverse, and I’ve ridden it, and there’s, there’s still a lot of climbing on it there.

Marcus Tillman 32:32
It’s not flat. No, there’s nothing flat about it, yeah, I took a little flack because I named it southern traverse. But you know, what are you going to call it? I mean, we, we’ve had some we can’t say them on the podcast. They’re dirty words after people have ridden it with their acoustic bike. But if you’re on an E bike, man, it’s great. It’s fine. Love an E bike. So about Midways through the through the trail, there is a tower road that goes to the towers that sit up top there. And I built a box and put it on there. And two weeks ago, I was my E bike was down. It’s in the shop, and I was riding my acoustic bike. And a friend of mine who’s not ridden southern traverse, he’s He’s thin, bent like you, hasn’t, hasn’t really been riding that much. But we were out there, and, buddy, I overheated. Yeah, it was one of those days when it was 95 Ooh, humidity was bad, you know, I didn’t eat and drink the way I was supposed to, and and here I was pouring water on my head, you know, trying to get out of the, get off the mountain.

Jeff Barber 33:43
I thought the water was for drinking but you poured it on your head.

Marcus Tillman 33:48
Well, you know, you got to do what you got to do. And I talked, I talked to to Wig, and he said, You know, I drank a bottle and I poured one on my hand. Yeah, it was just so hot the last few weeks. This feels so good.

Jeff Barber 33:59
We’re sitting down here, 81 is the high. But right now it’s not 80.

Marcus Tillman 34:03
Yeah, it just feels so nice.

Jeff Barber 34:07
Yeah, so nice. Well, so you know, as a trail boss, I’m curious to know, like, what’s one thing you wish that riders knew that would make your job easier? Like, if you could tell everybody that rolls up here to the trailhead, give them one piece of advice that make your job easier? What would that be?

Marcus Tillman 34:23
Wow, what could the riders do? Hmm, that’s a tough one.

Jeff Barber 34:30
I mean, skidding? I don’t know there’s like, obvious stuff, but is that even a problem?

Marcus Tillman 34:35
Do you well, you know, oddly enough, we don’t close Coldwater to almost anything for a while, doesn’t really want it closed, and we really don’t have to. If you’ve, if you’ve ridden out here, even in a pouring rain, guilty I’ve done that. I mean, it’s a, it’s a sandy dirt, soil. Yeah, it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of rock. Uh, certainly it does erode. We’re not saying it doesn’t erode, but I don’t think a tire rolling on it, even in a pouring rain, has much of an effect on it. Yeah, it’s the freeze thaw. Okay, oddly enough, and really, the freeze thaw in areas where I’ve just built, where I’ve just dug a bunch of dirt out of a borrow pit, stacked it, and tried to try to rebuild what Rich and the guys had built. Initially, we have not had freeze thaw for a number of years, but the last two, the last two winners, we’ve had about a week of freeze thaw, and it was awful. You know, I had to deal with it when I lived in Virginia. But, you know, freestyle is just not something that we deal with,

Jeff Barber 35:47
I mean, to people listening in like, northern areas, they’re like, oh, yeah, that’s huge problem. But here, here, it’s no, not generally.

Marcus Tillman 35:55
No, it’s, it’s typically not. Our friends from up north would usually come here during the winter because they’d have to deal with just terrible stuff. Just terrible stuff. But it literally felt in some places like oil was mixed with the dirt. You just could not stay vertical on the bike. Could not stay up. Yeah, you know, it was just, it was not fun at all. So now I know why they come down here, yeah, yeah. So freestyle, I suppose you know if you, if you ride out and you’re making a rut turn around, yeah, it’s just not worth it. Okay? It’s probably not gonna be very fun anyway. You’re not gonna be able to sit in these travel records.

Jeff Barber 36:30
Well, I guess another issue that I’ve heard about and, and maybe, maybe you’ve dealt with this here, maybe you haven’t, but is, is people making their own edits to the trail, doing maintenance things that they think is going to help, but, you know, actually is not, or other people are going to be upset.

Marcus Tillman 36:48
Well, you know, you always have the occasional ride around somebody. You know, there’s like on chili has a couple of places where, you know, the rock garden is fairly challenging, yeah, and I probably should go in, it’s eroded a little bit. They’re a little more rocky than they were the you know, you can sink a tire, you know, get a tire stuck in between a rock. But they do go around, they’ll widen the trail.

Jeff Barber 37:17
When you see those, yeah, when you see a ride around, is that kind of telling you that, hey, I need to do something to the trail, because people are are riding around?

Marcus Tillman 37:25
Sometimes it’s sometimes it’s, what do they call themselves, enduro bros. They just want to just straight line the whole trail. So it depends. I’ve kind of taken the position that if it’s not an erosion issue, if it’s not going to create erosion for me and create an issue, or if it’s just really unattractive, I don’t do much about it, yeah, but the next time, and I may change my mind the next time I’m in that area with an excavator, I may go grab a tree and drag it and put it in Place and block it. You know, I may go if someone was bypassing the squirrel catcher on Rock Slot.

Jeff Barber 38:08
That’s the whole point of the squirrel catcher.

Marcus Tillman 38:13
It was rock and, you know, there’s nothing beyond that point that’s green. Yeah, you can get to that point. And you take a left on Bullfrog, and you come back down, you know, you can, you can have an easier way around, but, but, you know, rock slot is one of the especially just past that point, it gets a little steep. And there are the most technical climbs on the mountain. Are right, or on that trail, yeah, and then it leads into bomb dog, okay? Which, if you’re, if you’re a green rider, inexperienced rider, don’t like rocks, feel don’t feel comfortable flying through the air. You really don’t have any business on Bomb Dog.

Jeff Barber 38:58
It’s so hard, though, because that’s the trail. You know, everybody that’s heard of Coldwater, they they’re like, you have to ride Bomb Dog, but, but if you’re not, if you’re not a confident rider…

Marcus Tillman 39:09
You’ll have to walk a lot of bomb dog if you’re not a confident rider. Yeah, it’s people have asked why we don’t have more black diamond trails here, and then, after they ride here, especially the people from flatter areas in Florida, Mississippi, South Alabama, they’re like, you really don’t have any green trails here.

Jeff Barber 39:28
I was going to ask about Black Diamond trails, because I feel like this is a rider psychology kind of question too. Like ride arounds, where every time I write out here, I like riding Gazza, but every time I go, it’s, it’s almost overgrown. I mean, it’s like, nobody rides it. But I’m sure you also hear from lots of people that are like, we need more hard trails.

Marcus Tillman 39:52
You’re right. And you know, Gazza was, it used to be really bad, overgrown. And then I would go out and, you know. Has those, I don’t know, it’s a half dozen places where it’s exposed.

Jeff Barber 40:02
Especially at the top, the grass gets kind of tall.

Marcus Tillman 40:06
So I’ve made it a point. I went in and I’ve sprayed it with some stuff to make sure that you can get through it, you can see it, yeah, because you can almost lose the trails, especially in the fall, you know, I do go in and blow it. And, you know, people fuss you blow trails like, Well, you wouldn’t see it if I didn’t blow.

Jeff Barber 40:25
I feel like this is not a criticism of you. This is, this is nobody’s riding it. And that’s why it needs to be maintained.

Marcus Tillman 40:33
It’s a very hard trail. And when we, you know, a true expert writer is going to go out there and just kill it, you know, he’s going to be just fine. And you’re a very good rider, you’re going to do just fine.

Jeff Barber 40:44
Okay, I can make it down.

Marcus Tillman 40:47
But if you’re tentative, you know? I mean, I had a guy probably he rode it more than anyone, and he was on a fully rigid bike with 2.8 tires, whoa. Oh yeah. Well, he just go up there and just kill it. And then I have people that have 170 travel bikes, and they walk the rock garden. So it’s, it’s not written that much, so I don’t spend a ton of time on it. I get, I clear the trees, you know, I get those and when they’re reported. But you’re right. That was one of those trails that was built before I had this job, and Randy Spangler built that also, and he was out there with his excavator. What an amazing guy, amazing builder. Yeah, incredible work. Can work just like a Trojan. And so I spent a few days up here grubbing with him, and I was like, you know, who’s going to ride this trail? Because it looked pretty challenging to me, and I saw where he was going, and, you know, where he built those, the big rock berms, those were not built yet. They he was in the process of building them. So he was, you know, had a pretty big machine, and was putting them in place. And, you know, they really even, what, 2015 I think it was finished. So we’re coming up on 10 years ago. Everything’s still in place. It’s all locked in. You know, the dirt erode some, right? But he, he placed that very well. And he said, well, the guy with big cojones and six inches of travel is really what this what this is for. And if you maintain your momentum, and I’m sure you know this, because you’re really good rider, if you maintain your momentum, and you just, you just stay in it, yeah, there’s, there’s, you’ve got to be committed, I mean, and you just, whether you think, whether you think there’s a line on the other side of that, those rocks, there’s going to be something there, right?

Jeff Barber 42:42
You got to trust the trail for sure. Yeah, that’s crazy.

Marcus Tillman 42:48
So you mentioned about blacks, black diamonds, yeah? So we had not, we did not have any double black diamonds, and we had a couple of riders who said, Hey, let’s, let’s do some hand build stuff. Yeah, and that’s where PIP and Jordy’s.

Jeff Barber 43:06
I’ve ridden that, and it’s, it’s insane.

Marcus Tillman 43:10
Pip is a local rider named Steve, retired firefighter. I mean, if you think you’re too old to ride, he’s 63, years old. And if I’m not mistaken, you still see a six pack on him. Wow. So the dude is, he’s a, he’s, he’s told, yeah, so PIP is, is a double black. It’s, it’s kind of sketchy. It’s steep in places, and jordy’s is just ridiculous. Yeah, you know, there was a young guy. He doesn’t live in the area anymore, but it’s kind of his, his legacy. There are 360 degree pitches, very steep, very steep. Pretty much everybody, even the best riders that I know who had GoPros, they were all on the ground. You know, at some point during that, yeah, you know, it’s just going to go out from under you.

Jeff Barber 43:58
It’s a lot of work that trail for sure to ride. So for someone who’s never ridden at Coldwater and who’s coming out, and they’re obviously an experienced rider, we’re not, we’re not talking about beginners here. What’s your recommended route?

Marcus Tillman 44:15
Well, we have a couple of them. You know, it’s an experienced rider that can put in, say, 15 miles, you know, you leave from this, and we’ll just talk from this parking lot here, yeah, the upper, this main parking This is the bears, you know, baby bear, Mama Bear, the baby bear to mama bear is a really fun opening to, you know, you get to go downhill.

Jeff Barber 44:39
I mean, it reminds me it’s almost bike parky, almost, yeah, almost, not quite that, that wide or that level, but it’s gonna get some speed.

Marcus Tillman 44:47
Ad it’s amazing, you know, because they designed it, really before bike parks and built it, they kind of knew the direction bikes were going, and maybe, maybe they were. They’re just, they. So smart. I mean, yeah, you know, rich Edwards is one of the most intelligent trail design guys on the planet.

Jeff Barber 45:07
It was a big vision, for sure. I mean, I’m thinking back to you were saying, yeah, when they first laid it out, that they were thinking 75 miles of trails.

Marcus Tillman 45:16
I mean, this was pre-Bentonville, yeah, it was funny, because at one time, I think we had 30 builders here, like, wow. Like, almost every trail builder, of of of any record was here on this mountain working. And then we got that 35 miles, that first 35 miles built. And they all went to Arkansas, wow. Most of them, yeah. So you start off from here, yeah, baby or Mama Bear. And then you can pick, you know, Papa Bear is kind of an introduction to the tread that you’re going to encounter on most of the mountain, pretty rocky, you know, some sidelines, and then, you know, you hit your you hit Cassidy. Going up Cassidy, that’s about a mile climb. That’s going to introduce you to the, you know, if you didn’t eat, right? If you put on a few pounds, you’re going to feel that. And then now, you know, we have the new tunnel. You go through the tunnel, which is a culvert, yeah, it’s a tunnel. And then you climb up Talladega, you know. And you know, Talladega was named because when they were laying it out that little canyon right there catches the sound from the restaurant. Oh, cool. So the cars were actually running and they could hear it. So then you you get to the top of Talladega, and you cross over the service road, Stebbins. And then you have some pretty good options, and a lot of them are downhill. So you can go Talladega to Trillium to hare, and that’ll give you kind of a long, fun downhill. Yeah, and without going to the other parking lot, you can, you can do an about face, the middle part of hair, and then come back up tortoise to chili. Okay, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a really good, you know, not a ton of climbing. And tortoise is a lot easier than Cassie. And then when you get on chili, you’ve got a couple of rock gardens to deal with. That’s always fun, switchbacks, and then you have some Roly Poly stuff. And I always tell people, you get back to the to the rabbit hole, and there’s a water box there, so you can, you know, if you need some water, you can get some. And then you continue on chili that the next intersection you’ve got a decision to make. So am I? Am I dying? You know, then you get to come down Goldilocks to upper Papa Bear, and then back to the parking lot with very minimal climbing. And am I? Am I pretty good shape? Then you continue Bullfrog to rock slot to bomb dog that, you know, because from that intersection you’ll that’s about a mile of climbing to get to the start of bomb dog. And then another fun option is to stay on chilliwee. That section of chili Flow Motion built it. Valerie had started it, Valerie Naylor, and then Flow Motion finished it, and it flows into bomb dog about halfway down. Okay, right. So you get a nice long, kind of a technical downhill. I say kind of technical. It narrows up some, and it has some rock features and some stream crossings. If it’s raining, they’ve got water in them. But then you’re downhill into bomb dog, and you don’t have to climb again until that middle climb on bomb dog, that switchback climb, and then you have another mile of downhill on bomb dog to finish up. And you cross over the service road there, and then you have a one mile climb back to your vehicle. Yeah, back at that climbing. Yeah. So that’s a that’s probably a 15 mile. That’s only 15 miles, about 15 miles, yeah, maybe a little bit more, maybe 17. Okay, not much. And there is some recommendations on Strava. I think there’s an all day Coldwater. I think it’s between 25 and 30 miles.

Jeff Barber 49:16
But that’s not even that’s almost half of it.

Marcus Tillman 49:20
And it is amazing, and that was actually laid out before southern traverse. Okay, so if you just, if you just want your your heart broken and tail whipped, you throw southern traverse in, yeah, it’s, it’s really tough. I mean, I’ve not put anometer on them, but I think some of those climbs which they’re not super long, it’s not like miles long, but you’ll have 100 yards at 20%.

Jeff Barber 49:50
Yeah, they’re surprisingly steep.

Marcus Tillman 49:52
It’s followed by a rock garden that you get, you know, that you can’t see till you’re right on top, yeah?

Jeff Barber 49:57
Yeah. Well, what kind of bikes do you see most people bringing out here? What do you recommend?

Marcus Tillman 50:03
You know, it’s a lot of people, a lot of our locals, that they like to they’ve moved from the road riding, and a lot of people got out of road riding or or have cut it way back, because the cellphone, you know, everybody’s, you know, you’re in danger, yeah? You know, back when I did a lot of road riding, 20 years ago, we were just a nuisance. You know, they had to deal with us, yeah, but they saw us right now, distracted drivers. Now they’re not even looking they just hit you at 60 miles an hour and keeping, you know, yeah, what was that? You know, a stick. So we have a lot of people who are transferring over from road, and they, they fell on, fell over gravel, and then they see all of us out on mountain bike trails, and so they go get a hardtail, yeah. And we’re like, well, that’s, you know, if you’re, if you’re less than 30 years old and rubbery, and you haven’t had a lot of broken bones, and you know, a hard tail at Cold water is, is? It’s not an impossibility, but it takes a certain rider willing to put up with a lot of vibration. So I recommend a full suspension. Of course, the new bikes are wonderful, and everybody builds a really good bike when, especially when you get to the carbon frames. Yeah, you want some pretty good suspension. And you know, wheels are important. But you know, I don’t you know car everybody loves carbon wheels. But you know, if you’re the kind of guy that that just cringes every time a rock bumps against your carbon fiber, then don’t bring that whole water, lot of rocks here. So, you know, a lightweight wheel set. Wheel set is ideal. And then tires, you know, if you don’t have sidewall protection, you’re probably going to be spending some time staying outside of the trail, yeah, changing your tire, yeah. So it is a heavier, beefier bike is best for cold water. So 130 travel. I mean, I’ve seen some bikes now, some of these are really work well at 120 but, you know, 120 would probably the bare minimum. And then up to, you know, 151 60, because you got you you are climbing. Yeah, you know that we don’t have a lift. You know there’s, there’s no, nothing, nothing, but your legs are going to get you to the top of the mountain. And that’s why e bikes have really gotten very popular at Coldwater.

Jeff Barber 52:35
Yeah, and yeah, I was going to ask about that a little bit. So e bikes have always been allowed. Here, is that correct? Or is that a new development?

Marcus Tillman 52:45
Well, technically, an E bike has a motor, right? Motorized vehicles are not allowed, yeah, on state lands property, okay, but it’s it has not been enforced here. They don’t push me to do it. Yeah, and I don’t have a badge or a gun, so I can’t enforce it. But we do. We do encourage. You know, if you come out and ride we could we being either the city or neba, the SORBA chapter here, according to the Forever wild our state lands director, we could apply for an exemption, okay, and so you technically have to have an exemption to be legal, okay, so you know it’s, It’s a touchy subject. Some people hate e bikes, and I’ve never adopted technology quickly on anything, but I was a fast adopter of E bikes, not really of my own accord. I mean, I haven’t. I’ve only had an E bike of about six months, but I saw them come to the mountain, and I would see guys with E bikes and acoustic bikes on their racks, and they would grab the E bike and go. So they weren’t, you know, they weren’t just pure e bike riders, yeah, but if it enables a person that maybe life got in the way, you know, they maybe they were really, really good fit rider five years ago, and they had kids, they had an apparently to take care of. They switched jobs, they moved, you know, something happened in their life that took them off the bike, yeah, but they still have that memory. They can get on a bike, go out 3040, miles, and knock it out, and just, you know, just drag people all over the mountain, yeah. And so the E bike allows that to happen. It has its it has its place, you know. And I, I make some of my, some of my hardcore friends, really upset. I mean, I see a time in the future, 10 years from now, when. You want a non e bike, you’re gonna have to special order it.

Jeff Barber 55:03
Yeah, that’s gonna make a lot of people mad to hear that prediction.

Marcus Tillman 55:07
Well, it’s our, our whole purpose. We want to get more people on bikes, yeah, you know, we, we build trails. We, we want people outside.

Jeff Barber 55:19
Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say, is, you know, I’ve ridden e-bikes here, and, you know, I mean, 56 miles of trails. I’m pretty fit, but there’s no way I could do that. I would destroy myself. It would take most pretty much, all day with an e-bike. I can see, I can see everything. I get to enjoy the whole mountain. Yes, and yeah, for me, that wouldn’t be possible without.

Marcus Tillman 55:42
I mean, look, I consider myself old guard. I mean, I got into the sport in the mid 90s, you know, like I said earlier, our bikes were terrible, yeah. I mean, when you look at them, when you look back on what we rode and what we wrote them on, yeah, it’s like, gosh, you know what was wrong with me? And that’s why, you know, there were a lot of our friends who said, yeah, there’s something wrong with you. They do like doing that. Yeah. So the the bike now often get allows you to go and hit things that we we wouldn’t have even thought of, and now we’re out here building trails for our for the population. I mean, America’s fat, you know? I have a BMI. You know, I can remember the last time I went to the doctor and I was telling him what all I do. And he’s he looked at me. He looked over his glasses, and he’s like, you realize your BMI is over 31.

So I looked at him, and I’m like, so I’m fat, but I’m fit, right? You can be both heart rates, you know, low resting hearts, you know, high 40s, low 50s, you know, and never, I mean, I can’t get it above about 160 right now, but that’s 220 minus your age.

Jeff Barber 56:57
Yeah, yeah, you’re right in that zone.

Marcus Tillman 57:02
America is out of shape. So more trails close to home. That’s embassy initiative thoroughly embraced that we built a little four mile trail system in in West Anniston, which, you know, those kids would they they can see cold water from their front porch, but they had no idea what it was, yeah, and now they can go out and ride. They’re wide, easy trails. They’re very easy to ride. You can ride them on a Walmart bike. So it’s, you know, ride them on a huffy and I don’t know if that’s bad for me to say, Walmart bike, but, you know, a target bike, yeah, entry level bike, department store bike, department store bike. They can go, they can go hit that trail on anything they want. We need to get Americans, and probably all over the world. We need Americans outside doing stuff. And mountain biking is it’s my hobby. That’s my love, that’s my passion. So I want to see more people on bikes, yeah? And, like my wife, she she wants to come ride with me. She can’t ride with me if I’m, yeah, she doesn’t have a pedal assist, right? I mean, I may take my non e bike and she has an E bike, and then we have a good day together, right?

Jeff Barber 58:13
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think part of the and, you know, I’m curious to get your, your professional take on this. You know, I mean, there’s lots of arguments that people have against e bikes and why they don’t care for them, or why they don’t think people should be riding them. But what are the arguments? Well, I mean, we won’t get into all of them, but one of them, I think, is that they cause problems on the trails, either in terms of maintenance, they cause more wear and tear, or they’re more user conflicts because of them, because of speed differentials. So I’m curious, in your role as as a trail boss, do you see either of those problems because of E bikes? Did they make it worse? Or is it just people? Is it just that’s who the rider is?

Marcus Tillman 59:02
I’ve heard those arguments, yeah, so I’m having a hard time remembering his name. It’s on another podcast. Glenn is his first name is somebody we’ve podcast. He’s a trail designer in New Zealand. Hmm, okay, yeah, don’t know he was at the trail builders, a trailer Association meeting. Okay, Georgia last year. He was the, as a matter of fact, he was the recipient, the lifetime recipient. So it’s Glenn, okay, so when this podcaster asked him about, you know, are you designing two way trails? He looked at him like he was. He’d lost his mind. He’s like, why would we do that? Yeah, you know. And so a two way trails have their place, you know, to get somebody from point A to point B. Southern traverse, that’s a two. Way trail, chili, one of our it’s a two way trail. Bomb dog is not, yeah, okay, hair is not. You know, our downhill specific trails need to be ridden downhill only one direction, yeah? So user conflict is a problem on a two way or potential problem on a two way trail, yeah? If, if we had 2000 people here, be lots of conflict. There would be a lot of conflict, yeah, but it would be minimized, because rich laid out these trails, the your hub to hub, the the two way trails are designed. They don’t have blind spots, they don’t have berms, yeah, you know, they don’t have jumps. I mean, you know, a rider could jump up in the air on them. So your features are minimalized on the two way trails. So I think cold water specifically could probably handle it a busy day, even if people had e bikes.

Jeff Barber 1:01:05
I don’t know if people are thinking, I mean, even on a one way trail, if they’re thinking that speed differential is a problem on climbs, maybe, you know, I mean, if you’re not on an e-bike, you’re going a lot slower climb. But that’s just passing etiquette.

Marcus Tillman 1:01:20
I think that goes to the person. It’s not the bike they’re on, because you can have expert riders who are, you know, not very nice, and they’re going to blow by you too, you know, going downhill, and they blow by you up and down. So I think the problem may be, I’ll take that part of the argument, an inexperienced person on an E bike that doesn’t understand passing could create an issue, yeah? And, and passing on a downhill. I mean, who does that?

Jeff Barber 1:01:50
I’ve seen people do it. They’ll get up close to you, right? They’ll ride your wheel. And, you know, that’s the worst feeling when somebody does that race.

Marcus Tillman 1:01:58
It was during a race, oh, yeah, that that’s, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody just pass like, like, I may have, you know, like, if me and four buddies are out riding, yeah, and, and somebody gets out in front of me and they’re, they’re just not having they’re not feeling it, yeah, you know, I’ll go around them. I mean, it’s not uncommon for me to roll up by somebody and start talking to them, because I like to talk, so they may get the message, you know, hey, I’m gonna pull over, you know? But you know, that’s just, I think that’s people, and I can accept that part of the argument that E bikes can put inexperienced people who don’t understand trail etiquette. But that’s our problem, yeah, that’s the OGS problem. Yeah, that’s the that’s mining here, you know, because somebody brought that person after the trip, right? And they probably didn’t have very good etiquette either, yeah? So you can say, you know, a bad teacher, you know, is going to produce a bad student, right? How you may want to say it. But you know, trail signage, you know, and just that, Gumby be nice, right? There’s no reason to be behind out here. We’re all having fun.

Jeff Barber 1:03:12
What about maintenance? Do they cause more damage to trails than other bikes?

Marcus Tillman 1:03:19
So high traffic. Okay, I can, I can say that. I mean, I can, I can, I could take

Jeff Barber 1:03:24
Because you’re covering more miles, if you’re potentially, you’re covering more miles.

Marcus Tillman 1:03:27
But I don’t believe that the E bike, because it’s heavy and it doesn’t have enough power to spin the tire. So when they first started coming out, they were, they didn’t have very good batteries, but they did have power, and they were heavy, yeah. And I follow them around, I’d follow them. And if, you know, if they stood up and sprinted in turbo, you know, they they might leave a little dirt, you know, they may lift it up, yeah. But you know what, I weigh, 250 pounds, and if I stand up and sprint, I’m doing the same thing. You’re gonna ban heavy riders and the weight issue too.

Jeff Barber 1:04:03
I mean, you know, me on an e-bike versus you on a non e-bike, yeah, you probably still gonna outweigh me.

Marcus Tillman 1:04:12
Yeah. I had a Pivot Switchblade. It was 30 pounds. I’m 250 yeah, that’s, that’s a lot of weight going up and down the mountain. And if I were, you know, if I had the discipline that I had 10 years ago, I was fit, and I could stand up and sprint on something, I don’t really sprint too much anymore, but, you know, I just can’t take that argument. I’ve had a professional trail builder say, well, it allows more people to cover more miles, so, yeah, it does create the erosion. But do you know what that’s kind of if, if coldwater had 1000 people a day, I would repair that and just grin and smile and laugh and just keep right on, keep right on trucking. Yeah, I want that, you know. Now, let me i. Let me put a caveat. There is a trail system in Dothan. It really was not laid out to handle the number of people and it the entire trail system is two way. They’ve had some issues. Okay? I mean, the trails are easy enough for walkers, from moms with strollers and yeah, if you have a bike that can go 20 miles an hour, especially with an inexperienced rider, and they’re facing each other, yeah, you know, it goes back to the are you a rude person or are you a nice person? Right? You know it’s maybe they could change it to direction on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I don’t really know what their answer is. I know that they’ve had some issues, yeah, and that is a forever wild land trust, and the leaders there have, they’ve tried to enforce, you know, the no E bike, I know that they handle a little bit different than we do.

Jeff Barber 1:06:09
And well, it seems like it’s working here. I mean, you mentioned that it’s not totally legit, you know, completely legal, but there haven’t been any issues.

Marcus Tillman 1:06:18
There have not been issues that you’re talking about. And look, I have a vested interest in somebody tearing these trails up. Yeah, so I looked pretty carefully, and I had to give it my thumbs up. I don’t see where they’re going to do more damage than than a heavy rider that that is, that is fit. Because, I mean, I’ve seen some 230 240 pound guys that come out here and they knock out 50 miles. Yeah? I mean, they’re just, you know, they’re just beast, yeah, and I can’t tell them. Well, look, you can’t go ride, you know, you rode yesterday. You know, you put in more miles than you than you should have. Yeah, that, that? I mean, I can’t even fathom, fathom that. So I don’t have a problem with the E bike. I have one now myself. I love it. It look just personally, I can go and test an area or section that I’ve reworked in my work clothes. I mean, you know, people can’t see me. I’m wearing, I’m wearing a pocketed, pocketed t shirt and jeans. I can get on my E bike and go session an area that I’ve worked because, you know, if I’ve compacted it and got everything in place, but I don’t have the distance or the height just right, I don’t have the lip just right then, then I while I’ve still got the machinery there, then I can, I can redo it. Yeah, if I’ve moved on, and I’m miles and miles away, and I got to just live with it until the next time I come to that area.

Jeff Barber 1:07:46
Right, right? So, yeah, well, so I know there’s a big lifetime race coming up at Coldwater in October, so I’m curious like, what kind of work and planning has gone into that, and what, what that means for the trails to have an event like that?

Marcus Tillman 1:08:03
Well, we’ll get to see how 1000 people at it, right? Your dream is coming true. My dream is coming true. And we’re hoping that, of course, you know, gosh, we’re getting pretty close. We’re basically in what, September, yeah. I mean, this is the end of August, so, you know, less than two months or right? In two months, yeah, you know, it’s been a lot of work for me. Of course, it’s a labor of love. I mentioned over the winter I had, I built the exit trail for it. It’s called Leadville Express. Okay, I let them name it too. Yeah, that’s what they came up with. Cool. So, Micah, Micah’s, he’s, he’s, he’s my contact for lifetime. He’s the promoter.

So building that trail and keeping it, keeping the vegetation off of it, because, you know, it’s a new trail.

Jeff Barber 1:08:57
When did you finish it?

Marcus Tillman 1:08:59
Technically, I finished it like in February.

Jeff Barber 1:09:02
Oh, so it’s that the whole spring and summer to grow in.

Marcus Tillman 1:09:06
Buddy out there with this ring, it goes through a power line crossing. And when I was building it, I knew that. I knew that kudzu was there. Yeah, Kudzu is in the south, and I did my best to pop all of the their little root balls, yeah, pop them out and throw them off to the side. And it looked almost like a road. It looked very wide. I built it wide on purpose. Yeah, it’s, it was talking about the passing on the downhill, yeah, and it’s a downhill on the race. You know, you’re going downhill. So I wanted it to be, you know, passable, you know.

Jeff Barber 1:09:45
Because it’s also that’s toward the start of the race, right? So is the field spread out by that point?

Marcus Tillman 1:09:51
It’s actually the end of the race. It’s at the very end, because it’s when you exit, you cross over. For highway 202. And then you go Lagarde Street, and then you hang a right onto 10th, and then you’ve got two blocks to the finish line. Okay, so it is the last chance for a dirt passing, you know, if, and, you know, I envision, you know, hopefully we don’t have one guy out there killing everybody, you know, I would like to see, you know, four or five, six riders that, you know, they still got a little smoke in the leg, and they want to be number one or three, or whatever, yeah, and they’re going to sprint and pass each other and it, but it also has to double as a climbing trail, because it, it brings you up from that glennatti Trailhead we had Betty Carr was a local advocate for cycling, so we called it Bulldog Betty. Okay, so that’s and Aniston High School is the Bulldogs Nice. So it kind of fit very well. So I had to build that trail. And then, of course, the tunnel, which is basically, it’s a culvert. It’s nine feet long, nine feet tall. We bought it in panels. We opted to not get a single piece. So we had a big trail work day. Our local, local guy, Tom Nelson, was actually in Louisville where they made it. It was $10,000 total.

Jeff Barber 1:11:21
Oh, my goodness. What’s crazy to me is that, yeah, this, the club took this on. This wasn’t, you guys didn’t hire no a professional trail builder to do this.

Marcus Tillman 1:11:38
This was volunteers, and Tom raised the money from sponsorships. So the the the one piece of steel, galvanized, was going to be about 5000 but it weighed 2000 pounds, wow. Um, I’m pretty limited. It’s, it’s in a pretty remote area of the mountain. It’s on top of the mountain, yeah. So I was, I came up with the idea to fly it in place with a helicopter, like, you know, and that would have been so cool, dramatic, Oh, gosh. Well, you know, we could have called the TV station. I mean, how many trail systems get the fly in a trail feature with a helicopter? But I got outvoted on that, so we opted to get one that’s in panels. So it was eight panels and 340 bolts, you know, and, and so I pulled it up with my little UTV and got it in place, and then we had a trail work day. And, gosh, we probably had 20 people up here. It was really nice to see that many people come up and work. And, you know, everybody’s arguing with each other, you know.

Jeff Barber 1:12:36
I saw pictures, it looked like it was kind of muddy too, like it was terrible.

Marcus Tillman 1:12:40
Yeah, it was. There was mud everywhere. And I had tried to prepare the area, but it just kept raining, you know. So I just had basically a dip in the in the dirt to once we got it completed, I took the excavator and just kind of pushed it in place and to see what it looked like then, and what it looks like now. That was a lot of dirt, a lot of dirt I probably moved. You got to remember, I have a 4000 pound excavator, okay, I probably moved the equivalent of three tri axles of dump, dump truck. Yeah, wow, it’s without dirt. So almost every chance I had, I was about there working on it, doing and doing the other things, tree removal, because every storm knocked down trees, it’s just been a really busy year. Yeah, busy, busy year. Even if we had not had the tunnel and new trail, I would have been pretty busy just trying to get the trees in control of vegetation, so clearing the parking lots, you know, I’ve, I’ve taken a box blade and kind of straightened out the parking lots, got them a little smoother. That’s probably, that’s probably it. I mean, it’s and then I’m, I told Micah that I would rake and blow pretty much the whole course, before they, before they got, got here. So I’ve been doing that, you know, every time I’m in an area, I go blow, you know, two or three hours, and I should have everything cleared off, yeah, and then hair has, has taken a pretty hard hit it. It was in its rotation to have some rework. So I will, once I get the tunnel completely finished, and don’t need the excavator there, I will move across the mountain, and that’s where I’ll be working, probably when the race hits. Okay, so I’ll be on the on the lower hair area. It’s gotten really rough because, you know, these these rains have not been like little spring showers. Yeah, we, we’ve had storms overnight. Rains drop three and four inches, yeah. And, you know, when I was in mobile, a three or four inch rain, it just, you know, just went out into the Gulf. It’s just there, here, though, it, you know, it just piles up and just takes off running, and it destroys everything in his path.

Jeff Barber 1:14:56
Yeah. Do you anticipate a lot of work after the race?

Marcus Tillman 1:15:02
Well, you know, the normal stuff, I don’t know. We’ve never had this many people show up at one time. I mean, we’ve had a couple of races where we had 200 people and, you know, but they were in usually enduro’s, if we have, because there’s a run race too. So Friday is is 50k run and 50k mountain bike race. So those guys are going to all make one lap, and then on Saturday, there’s no run race. It’s just going to be the 100k where they make two laps. And I hope that, I hope that the trail just holds up. I think it will. I mean, it’s just more more laps. Doesn’t seem to hurt it, it. It’s almost like it helps it. It creates the line that dials them in, yeah, whereas, you know, you don’t have people riding it, then just the rain and the erosion just, just works. You know, rocks loose.

Jeff Barber 1:16:04
I think a lot of people don’t. And maybe, maybe it’s more non-bikers don’t realize that, yeah, it is the rain that does more the road, way more than bike tires. Bike tires actually, like, you’re saying a lot of cases, it helps it.

Marcus Tillman 1:16:26
Well, it creates a line. It’s like, you know, it’s kind of like on the highway, you know, there’s not a lot of debris that’s on the main highway. It’s off to the side shoulder, where the bikes, where the bikes tend we you know. So, you know, you have a flat tire. So I think when I was road riding those, what are they called, Gator skins? The Gator skins were that that’s what you pretty much have to go with, because you know you’re off on the side, there’s little bitty sediment, little bitty, bitty, tiny rocks they work into your tire. And next thing you know, you know, going down one of our steep runs and you’ve got a flat tire.

Jeff Barber 1:17:04
Terrible. Yeah. Well, that’s exciting to have that race come here for sure, and to showcase the work that that you and everybody in the community has done to make this trail system possible. I think I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on the podcast before. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it in articles, but Coldwater is one of my favorite places to ride. I live in Atlanta, which is an hour and a half ish, yeah, but to me, I mean, this is, this is where I love to test bikes. This is where I love to just ride for fun. It’s one of the closest places to Atlanta. Actually, a lot of people will go up to North Georgia, to the mountains there, but, but the quality of trails here is really special. And, yeah, really appreciate trails and the work that goes into them.

Marcus Tillman 1:17:52
Up north in North Georgia, North Carolina. I think DuPont was was laid out. But you know, a lot of your epic, you know, Bull, bull and Jake. Well, Jake was, Jake was probably laid out. But they were, they were the old school epic trails, you know, we just kind of adopted it was an old Forest Service road, an old skid skidder Road, yeah, you know. And it was fun. So when this was one of the first big projects, according to rich that it was laid out, they had purpose built clean slate, you know, they had, at the time, I think, 4000 acres. They’ve continued to buy the in holdings. So we’re probably approaching a 5000 acre, fairly clean slate, you know. And the equestrians wanted to have access. And this is another one of those that’s people get upset with me. The service roads could probably have equestrians on it, but, you know, it takes a certain type of horse because they don’t know when they’re going to come up on a trail where we’re going 30 miles an hour or three miles an hour. So it takes a certain type of horse, and there’s really no access point for them. They would, they would literally have to park in town and walk in, yeah, yeah. So, so the trails, the equestrian trails, are on the other side of the of the town, near the our mountain bike trails at McClellan.

Jeff Barber 1:19:24
Well, Marcus, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today. It’s super impressive to hear just how much goes into keeping cold water in top shape, and I know riders will appreciate the work that you and your team put in to make it such a great experience. So thanks.

Marcus Tillman 1:19:40
It’s been a good experience. I listen to your podcast a lot while I’m especially when I’m on the excavator, because I’m usually on it for extended period of time. Yeah, you keep your podcasts around an hour or so. That’s right, this one might go a little over, but that’s great. Well, I’m chatting everybody, everybody in town.

Jeff Barber 1:19:59
That’s what makes you a great guest. So to our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the Singletracks podcast so you don’t miss the next one, and you can find more interviews, gear reviews and trail recommendations over to our website, Singletracks, DotCom. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Peace.