Ron Cron defies easy description.

By turns he is a mechanic, a nature lover, a youth leader, a mountain biking fanatic and by his own estimate sometimes a troublemaker.

“I don’t care what people think of me,” Cron said. “You know, my grandmother told me, you’ve just got to find something you’re passionate about, and then find a way to make that passion benefit others.”

Born and raised in Anaconda, Cron, now 52, moved to Kalispell 25 years ago to open a mechanic shop. He said his love affair with mountain biking began after spending “a lot of time in a chiropractor’s office.”

“I’m a mechanic, and with being a mechanic comes a bad back,” Cron said. “He told me I need to find some way to strengthen my lower back, and while he was talking he was making this motion that looked like biking. So I said, ‘How about biking?’ and he said, ‘Well, yeah, that would be great!’”

Soon after, Cron found himself on a road bike, dodging traffic and choking on diesel exhaust. He traded it in for a mountain bike and hit the logging roads, but got beaten down by the hot summer sun. So then he took the bike to an old hiking trail, and he was hooked.

“It was love at first ride,” he said, grinning at the memory.

Soon after he began trail biking, Cron said he started to notice an absence of youths in the Flathead National Forest, despite the ample opportunities for outdoor fun he saw around him.

“In our forests, I’m out there every weekend, Saturday and Sunday, and I don’t see children out in the woods. No teenagers — it’s like they don’t exist anymore. When I was that age that’s where I was, and that’s what kind of threw me into this: How can we get more kids out there?”

Cron began recruiting youths to help him on the weekends with trail maintenance. He estimates he introduced over a hundred youths to the sport while also teaching them the value of volunteer work.

“What we wanted was the kids could construct and maintain the trails with Forest Service permission. I think that instills a lot of pride, and if they see someone doing something wrong, they self-police because they know it could be taken away from them.”

However, that vision has over the years been at odds with Cron’s checkered relationship with the Forest Service. He said it came to a head in a dispute over his most ambitious project, the Crane Mountain Trails system.

“The Crane Mountain Trails were a system of trails designed for shuttling to give kids a ride to the top of the hill,” Cron said, adding the low elevation would allow for slow, challenging downhill biking.

After Forest Service officials cautioned that the environmental evaluation for the trails would be costly and time-consuming, Cron raised $4,000 in a mountain bike raffle to pay for the review.

It was around this time, Cron said, that his main Forest Service contact retired, leaving him frustrated when he found his proposals falling on deaf ears.

“All of a sudden I couldn’t get anywhere, so I thought maybe by an act of civil disobedience I could get the trail rolling again,” he said.

And so, in violation of National Forest regulations, Cron said he built an illegal trail on Crane Mountain — and then turned himself in. He was charged in May 2009 with a misdemeanor for constructing an unauthorized trail on National Forest land, which carried a $325 fine.

“I told them I would turn myself in if [they] could get me in contact with whoever I need to talk to,” Cron said. “And we talked it over, and it was an odd, kind of stressed meeting because here I was, this outlaw, and here I broke the law to get their attention and I was asking them to help me out.”

Asked about their history with Cron, Forest Service officials gave accounts that differ slightly from Cron on a few details, but several employees were quick to praise Cron’s devotion if not his methods.

“He’s been a longtime volunteer and he does a tremendous amount of really good trail work,” said Wade Muehlhof, until recently the public affairs officer for Flathead National Forest. “[But] his vision of what a mountain biking trail should look like conflicts with our vision of what a multiple use trail should look like.”

Cron said he attempted to work with the agency to get approval for his four-trail project but ultimately it fell off the schedule. He insisted the project was “killed,” but recreation forester Joleen Dunham of the Flathead Forest said Crane Mountain Trails still has a chance of being revived.

“We didn’t get to it earlier [last] year because there was a larger project in that same area,” said Dunham, who explained they pulled it from the queue of pending projects and are considering adding it to a separate proposal. Left as a standalone project, she said Crane Mountain Trails “would have been very controversial, and is very controversial to other members of our community.”

The Forest Service often finds itself walking a fine line between those who want expanded access and recreation opportunities in the forest and those who want more protections in place for wildlife. But Dunham said she sees the project potentially reappearing in some form when the agency publishes its revised forest plan next month.

Seated in the office of his mechanic shop, Cron walks past a map of Flathead National Forest tacked up on the wall and begins thumbing through a pile of documents on the floor by his desk. Finding what he’s looking for, he extracts a thick manila envelope bursting with records, maps and various forest plans and proposals.

“I’ve done a lot of research. Here’s one from Trails for America, from 1966, when they first identified a need for increased mountain bike use.”

He rattles off statistics from reports spanning decades, pausing periodically to scan a highlighted passage with notes scribbled in the margins. Overall, the numbers seem to paint a picture of mountain biking as a sport with ever-growing popularity, particularly among adolescents.

But then he points to a report from Flathead Forest indicating only a tiny fraction of youths from the area use the forest.

“Overall, this tells me that if we were able to provide trails for youth to ride on, you’d see a lot more children out there,” Cron said.

So with the money raised for the Crane Mountain Trails evaluation, Cron is trying a different avenue: a 30-bike giveaway to get youngsters started off in mountain biking.

“I would like to find some kids that could use these bikes,” he said, adding that they aren’t top quality, but are more intended to just “get kids off the couch.”

“They’re a strider-type bike called a Rally Balance Bike. They’ve proved over the last few years to be the best way to teach an infant to ride a bike.”

Under the banner of the “Flathead Trail Fairies” (named for the behind-the-scenes maintenance Cron and his volunteers perform on trails), Cron is aiming to donate at least one bike each month to a child without the means to buy one.

At this point he’s all but given up on working with the Forest Service, but hopes through charity he can continue to make an impact.

“The National Forest is really a place that’s supposed to be ours to enjoy, and I want to get as many kids out there as possible. I want to get them on bikes before they get stuck on the couch,” he said.

Reporter Samuel Wilson may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.