 If you watch Common Ground Online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org. Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community, a partnership for generations, member FDIC. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host Scott Knudson. In this part one of our special two-part season nine finale, we detail the road biking culture in our Brainerd viewing area. When I started riding, I loved to ride a bike. You have freedom, you have exercise, you're out in the fresh air. They're just all good things from basically. You meet friends. I do a number of week-long tours every summer myself and I've met all kinds of friends through that. When I bike I feel better. I, it's anecdotal but I think I'm more productive at work. I think I'm paying attention. I'm looking forward to getting back on the bike at the end of the day. Those are the types of things that happen when you do something physical. That could be a walk over the noon hour or biking to and from or walking to and from work. We have several different areas of cycling for different enthusiasts. We have a lot of road riding. We have the Paul Bunyan Trail. We have the Cayuna Lakes Trail. For off-road enthusiasts, we have the Cayuna Mountain Bike area. There's off-road riding west of Gall Lake. In this area, if you're into cycling or if you're interested in maybe trying cycling, there are so many different things to do. In the summer, you have to decide, do I ride the Paul Bunyan Trail? Do I ride the Cayuna Lakes Trail? Do I ride with some of the many road routes? Do I go to Cayuna and ride the Cayuna single track? Do I go out to the pump track? Aiken County has an abundance of high quality gravel roads and gravel road riding is becoming more and more popular. So one of the decisions you have to make is not am I going to get on my bike, but what bike am I going to get on and then where am I going with it? Because there are so many options available. My name is Ray Griffin. I'm a long-time cycling advocate. I've never been without a bicycle since my first paper route, actually. I've been living in the Brainerd area since the 70s and really like the cycling opportunities around here. And over time, I've come across a lot of like-minded people and we have a really great cycling community in this area that just seems to work together and enjoy riding. In Crowing County, we're blessed with over 600 miles of paved roads and many of them are lightly traveled and our group, the Paul Bunyan Cyclists, hits a lot of them on our Wednesday night ride and other impromptu rides with other club members, but there's curves and hills and scenery and things you don't always see. And so over the years, we've developed a system of maps of likely cycling routes to share with people. We haven't posted on our Paul Bunyan Cyclists website. It's a fairly comprehensive group of maps and other agencies, even including the Minnesota Department of Transportation have used our website to talk about the biking in the Brainerd area. Ray Griffin was part of the original organization of Paul Bunyan Cyclists. And Ray knows the roads in Crowing County better than anybody. So he has become, over the last 30 years, our route maker. Dan Cruiser is a man I'm proud to call a friend, but there isn't much that's been happening in the cycling community that he hasn't been a silent partner, if not a vocal partner in since the 80s for sure. He was organizing the Paul Bunyan Cyclists before I knew there was going to be such a thing. Before there was our first meeting as cyclists, it was his idea to form something together. We were formed in 1989. There was a lot, a number of us that would be riding on the roads, but we hadn't organized ourselves together into an organization. And there was an ad that was run in a local paper that said anyone that might be interested in forming a bike club show up on such and such a night at such and such a room. So from that point, we just started meeting once a month and the numbers grew. Early on, we decided that we wanted to focus on the absolute basic part of cycling that we all loved, which was simply riding a bike. A typical Paul Bunyan cyclist wins the night ride, which is the backbone of our club. We would have a designated meeting place. Most likely it's going to be the Arboretum parking lot and Brainerd. We have a calendar with a recommended route for the evening, but that's adaptable based on weather changes, who shows up and how hard they want to ride. Everyone is accommodated from 10 or 12 mile an hour riders to the 20 plus mile an hour riders. And the rides vary from 15 to 50 miles, depending on where we are and what we feel like doing. And we've added maps and starts for other local communities. We'll start on the west side of Gaul Lake or we'll start in Neswa or Pequot or Crosby or Little Falls or Pine Center from time to time. We try not to be out of town more than two weeks in a row to accommodate people who don't feel like driving to bike ride. But we found that the out of town rides are pretty well accepted from the people that enjoy cycling and want to see other parts of the area and want to experience roads that they haven't ridden before or have ridden and really like, but just don't get too very often. In the summer of 2017, the Paul Bunyan cyclist joined the Central Minnesota Bike Club out of Little Falls for a group ride that centered in Little Falls and that made for a really nice experience when they have two clubs riding together. And so that's something that we hope to do again. The last couple of years we've scheduled rides with Little Falls. We'll drive down, meet them at whichever spot they choose to ride or whatever route they want to do, let them be the guides. We show up as guests and we meet new people. We choose the routes we want to try out. We ride them down along the river, route into the agricultural area, end up back with a nice get together at the end so we can schmooze a little bit and share experiences. And then we can repeat that other times in other places. And our group rides, we try to have safety meetings before the ride or at least discuss riding etiquette about riding single file where needed and no more than two abreast, stopping for stop signs, paying attention to the traffic, calling out traffic for the people riding with you and your group so everybody's aware. And it helps to make our rides as safe as possible. If somebody has an equipment problem, the others stop and help them and they ride in together and nobody gets left behind. It just makes the experience more pleasurable. On our Wednesday night club rides, we have a group that rides shorter and slower. We have a group that rides really long and really fast and then a couple of groups that ride somewhere in the middle. So there really is something for everyone. I've had many people say, I'd like to ride with you, but the Paul Bunyan cyclist, you're just too hardcore. You ride too fast. Well, the really hardcore cyclists that have written with us, no, we're not hardcore and we don't ride too fast. We can be rather slow and sociable. A lot of a cyclist really enjoyed new experiences and being able to ride things that you're not so familiar with that you could ride blindfolded. You're surprised by what's around the next corner and what the next hill feels like and variations in the road and keeps the senses going and puts you in touch with your bike and we just kind of enjoy that type of a change of pace. And it's fun to do it with other people. You know, that's why the Paul Bunyan cyclist works is because you're riding with like-minded people and cycling could be a very individual sport and anybody could go out and ride by themselves and experience similar things. They just don't have the camaraderie that you have when you ride with a club. Because our club rides are the biggest thing we do. That's really what the Paul Bunyan cyclists are all about is their Wednesday night club rides and those are published well in advance. They're on our website at PaulBunyanCyclist.com for the upcoming season. And so anyone can just log on, take a look at the ride schedule and if they're interested, show up where PaulBunyan cyclists are open to everybody. And we try to make those Wednesday night club rides such that no matter what your level of ability, there's something for you. You'll find that it's a group of people who are there just for their joy of cycling. So you'll find somebody to talk with and talk about other cyclists and talk about new bikes and maybe get together afterwards just to chat and have a refreshment and share the love of biking, I guess. Back in 1989, after we started meeting and we became the PaulBunyan cyclists, there were several of us that had ridden a number of tours around Minnesota and Wisconsin. And we thought it would be a good idea if we hosted our own bike tour for other folks to come to the Brainerd Lakes area and enjoy the same cycling that we were enjoying. I'm Sharon Boldy and I'm the current director of the Tour of Lakes Bike Ride. The way Tour of Lakes started was way back in 1989, the then group of PaulBunyan cyclists who are the host of the ride. And back in 1989, they were sitting around talking about, well, we'd like to do something fun. And what should we do? At that time, there was the Tour of Saints Bike Ride, which is another one day bicycle ride. And we want to do a ride, what should we call it? So what do we have around here? We have a lot of lakes. So they called it the Tour of Lakes Bike Ride. So that was in 1989. And the first ride was in 1990. It was the beginning of the club during that time, too. And in 1991, they were incorporated as a club. So the ride started in 1990. And here we are, 28 years later. The first 10 years, the director of the ride was a man named Gary Jensen, who did a great job. And then in the year 2000, I took over for Gary and I've been the director of the ride since then. We've been real fortunate over the last years to have Sharon Bodie as a director of the Tour of Lakes. Sharon has done an amazing job of keeping the Tour of Lakes true to its original form and adding value and creating a better and better experience each year. I wrote it one time in 1992 and I volunteered every year since. And so that's how you learn a job. I worked at registration. I did a rest stop, all the different jobs. And so I kind of set myself up for it. And then by the time Gary Jensen decided he didn't want to do it anymore than they asked me to. So I've been the director since then. Sharon Bodie is another good friend of mine. She's taken over running the Tour of Lakes for us after the first 10 or 12 years or so that we did it. And it's been doing an unsung hero's job of organizing us into something that we can repeat every year and get better and better. When the ride started, they didn't advertise. It was word of mouth, told their friends. First year, they had 400 people that decided they wanted to do it and it's gotten bigger ever since. Now I went through the numbers and looked every year between 800 and 1200 people. It got so big that we decided we had to cut it off at 1200 because we just couldn't handle any more than that. And the Tour of Lakes from its very beginning was centered around the idea of what are the things in a bike tour that we would personally enjoy? What qualities would it have that would make it good for us that make us want to come back? Our ride, of course, is on all paved roads. We try to pick roads that are low traffic, a nice shoulder, if possible. They don't always have a shoulder. But the Brainerd Lakes area is known for lots of lakes. You can see beautiful lakes, farms. There's one of our routes where it's more tour to farm than tour to lake. Low traffic out in the country, beautiful, beautiful roads. We provide routes and rest stop and safe traffic control, mainly through signs and paint, not necessarily with law enforcement, although they're helpful. One need to be because it's a tour and not a race. Cyclists pretty much follow the rules of the road. We have two routes. One is approximately 35 and one is approximately 65. When we started the tour, we had a 100 mile route also, but it got pretty hard to actually monitor that route. And so we dropped it after all. So you can do a short route or a long route. Every year we have a different starting place and a different route. And that means that each year people have something else to look forward to that's different than last year. We could put one there. Or it's weird though. Or down across the lake where there's a lot of traffic. Because I feel like there's something missing, but I don't think there is. I'm pretty sure it's good. For as much time as you put in on this. Yeah. It should be great. I think the joy of tour of lakes is the routing up here around the lakes, the quiet roads, the lakes and such. You're in scenery the whole time. In the past, we've started in Manhattan Beach. Niswa was our very first ride. We started in Niswa, Pequot Lakes, Garrison, Crosby, here in Brainerd. We started in Baxter. So various routes every year. Tour of lakes was our idea in the beginning because we have so many lakes around here. We thought we'd showcase the rides around nice scenic lakes. But the truth of the matter is you can't get that close to most lakes. And so if you look at the map, you'll see a lot of lakes. If you're on a road, you don't see a lot of lakes. But you will see a lot of low traffic country roads. Good riding surfaces, basic rural riding in an area that you don't really expect to see such things, you know? One thing about the Crowing County terrain, as opposed to many other areas of the country is it's primarily flat. People that ride here a lot think we have hills and would argue with me about it being flat around here. It's an area that attracts a lot of people because the cycling is not that difficult compared to other places that you could go to ride. One of the things that caught us off guard one year was our t-shirts from the very beginning have always had the route on the back of them. One year we did not include a map on the back of the t-shirts. And we found out very quickly from our riders that was a horrible idea and that the very next year the map would reappear and has continued to year after year. And so the tradition continues. It will be again this year and into the future. Many people have done multiple, multiple tour of lakes. Some people have done all 27 of them. We appreciate the people that wear t-shirts from the first year when we had 250 riders. And the next year it went to 800 riders. And after that we started getting scared about the numbers of people we were putting on the road. So we came up with a number of 1200 as our maximum. So if we get to 1200 entries, we cut off registration. 1200 is not a goal for us. This is not a charity ride. We're not raising money for anything. We just want to put on a ride of the kind that we would want to do. And that's our only goal. We aren't concerned by how many people come. We put on a good ride for those that want to come. We keep the costs as low as we can. It's totally rider funded. By that I mean we accept no sponsorship from any outside source. We pay for everything at regular retail prices. So the entire tour runs on a cost basis. And that was real important to us. We wanted to make this an event that people could do. And that meant we had to keep it affordable. So we try to be the best value possible. Someone who was riding the tour of lakes is going to experience riding with around a thousand riders that will all show up for registration during a couple hour period on the first Saturday in June every year in our designated start city. They will take off when they feel like it, you know, when they're ready. And they will ride 12 to 15 miles before the first rest stop. And then they'll get off and socialize a little bit, have something to eat, get on a bike, go another 10 to 20 miles depending on the availability of appropriate rest stop sites. We have tremendous food at our rest stops. A lot of the rides that are around the state and there's many. You get bananas and cookies. Our ride doesn't do that. We have way more than that. We've had everything. If you're hungry, you're at the right place. You've got burritos up there. We decided the tour of lakes were going to have rest stops that would just be over the top. And that's precisely what we've done and we continue to do. We put a huge amount of energy into what we serve and how much we serve. So if you go home at the end of the tour of lakes without gaining weight, we're disappointed. Once we get into flow of things, we're going to have the whole girl fold here. It'll be hot dogs. We've had omelettes to order. We've had blueberry pancakes. We've had walking tacos, pizza, breakfast burritos. You name it. So we always say that if you go away from our ride hungry, it's your fault, not ours. If we have a major complaint about our ride, it's that you gained weight on that 65 mile ride. It's a social event for a lot of people. We used to have paper registrations and we'd mail out to everyone every year. As we've gotten more modern now, we're doing it online registration. So you go to our website, PaulBynanCyclist.com. All the information will be there and there's a link to sign up for registration. We also, to past riders, we send out a postcard every year. And then so you fill that out, come to a registration in the morning and we'll have a list. We check you in, you get a free t-shirt and then you can leave at your leisure and then you just follow the route and come back. And the last several years, we've had a fun picnic lunch at the end. We've had a band playing and we have a picnic lunch at the end. With Tour of Lakes, our only goal is to have people come and ride their bikes and have fun. And if we have money left over, which we do sometimes, but not always, we give it to various bicycle related event. It could be an event like this year and last year we donated to the high school mountain bike team. We gave them some money so that children who can't afford it and it's pretty costly, we can pay their fee. And we've given away many, many helmets. The police, we gave bicycle lights to the police. So our entry fee pays for the ride and then if there's any money left over, we always use it for some kind of a bicycle related. We've given away many, many bicycles at Christmas through Lutheran Social Services or church groups or the school. They find children that may need a bike and we don't take credit. It's like it's coming from mom and dad. A lot of the infrastructure is getting better all the time. The people that plan the infrastructure are accommodating cyclists. They can see that it's something that people want to do. It's not only for visitors, but for residents. The city of Baxter is a good example in their comprehensive plan. Well, I'm Todd Holman. I serve on the Baxter City Council and I started working in this community as a local county planning and then the city planning staffer. So I was really in the grant writing trenches and in the map making trenches of trail and multimodal transportation planning kind of at all levels. I've been a bike advocate for many, many years. My mentor is Terry McGauhey. I think about Dan Cruiser, John Shabuck and certainly Congressman Jim Oberstar. People with great vision, but also people that had the tenacity and the know-how to get to the implementation phases. Todd Holman is currently on the Baxter City Council and he also works for the Nature Conservancy and he's another lifetime cycling enthusiast and he has been at the forefront of advocating for cyclists and non-motorized traffic in Baxter since he's had a position of responsibility there. In our two communities of Baxter and Brainerd, these are the communities I live in and bicycle in and observe the most. You see people going, if it's reliably maintained, the Paul Bunyan State Trail is a big component, the spine, if you will, of our trail infrastructure, but then the city paved shoulders that Brainerd and Baxter have created and trail connections to this really are reliable transportation. It isn't just recreation anymore and so people are able to expand the seasons. Not just summer bike riding, but I see people bike riding all winter and so it gives them a choice. One is if they just make that choice that they want to have an alternative way to get to work or in our case, they combine modes. Sometimes they will take the bus, the local dialer ride system, maybe they can take the bike for part of that and the trail for part of that, but these linear trails, these linear parks, if you will, connect people, connect communities, connect jobs and connect people from an apartment complex to a grocery store and they may not have had another way to get there, but we on the city side are trying to intentionally connect people where they live to where they want to go, where they need to go. Because we encompass Baxter, Brainerd, Crowing County, parts of Morrison County, parts of Cass County, it's hard to get everybody on the same page as far as making routes that connect from one to the other, but we've been working at that for the last five or six years in a way that seems to be effective and it's looking at the planning of things four or five years out when the work is really being done about what roads are going to be done and what's going to be repaved and what roads are going to be built and talk about the connectivity and not stopping at municipal lines or county lines where one party quits planning and the other party is not doing it. Right now, our city of Baxter wants to connect from the west side of Baxter to the east side of Baxter with a bridge to cross Highway 371 Ware to get to the Paul Bunyan State Trail so that we can connect to all of the other trail infrastructure, so that's a piece of work that's gonna be ongoing for us for a long time. It's written in the policy documents that we talked about, but when you look around a community, it's those key pieces of infrastructure, safe crossings at the major highways, bridges, tunnels, things like that that make the connection possible. I think it can only get better. I'd like to see more advertising of the Crowing County area as a cycling destination for road cycling because often when people think of riding, they think bike trails and Paul Bunyan Trail or the Cayuna Mountain bike trails, but they don't really talk about 600 plus miles of other good riding that we have in the area. They're very enjoyable and worth coming to stay a while. It's, my wife and I, bless her heart, she's very supportive. We've traveled in many places of the country and we take our bicycles and we ride and we've ridden in California and we've ridden in Louisiana and Mississippi and Florida and Iowa and we have better roads here than any of those places. We have things here that they could only dream of and we've been on those rides as organized rides with many other riders that come from all over the country. We know people travel to bike. We know people travel and spend money to bike and we should be playing into that a bit with talking about what we have in our area for people as a destination to come and ride because we have it, it's here. Thank you so much for watching. Join us again for part two next week on Common Ground. If you have an idea for Common Ground in North Central Minnesota, email us at legacy at lptv.org or call 218-333-3014. To watch Common Ground online, visit lptv.org and click local shows. The soles are segments of Common Ground. Call 218-333-3020. Production funding of Common Ground was made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community, a partnership for generations, member FDIC. 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