In celebration of national Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day, the Castlegar Parks and Trails Society hosted a mountain bike skills clinic at Kinnaird Park on Saturday.
Natasha Lockey from Kootenay Mountain Bike Coaching taught kids some biking basics and had a portable skills park setup so the kids could practice different tricks and skills.
“The idea is just to get the kids out biking. For us to be here is a great opportunity to promote biking in Castlegar. We did programs here for a number of years and we just had problems really filling them, so we wanted to be more present,” said Lockey.
The Castlegar Parks and Trails Society hosted the event in part to get kids out on the trails, but also just to get them biking.
“For me it's not just about biking on the trails, it's about biking in general,” said Mark Jennings, director of the society. “I find that there's a lot of kids get to the age around eight or nine, and for whatever reason—school, maybe computers, TV—they sort of lose interest with biking and then they don't carry that on into high school.”
Jennings hopes by getting kids out biking, they can get kids to bike for life.
“What I'm hoping is that by getting programs like this—and hopefully we'll get some programs going in the schools too; Natasha's working on that—... we'll be able to get those kids through that transition period and have them ride their bikes to school—to high school, to college, and eventually maybe to their first job.”