Rusty Baillie doesn’t let a little thing like age keep him from enjoying, improving North Idaho

Rusty Baillie grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in South Africa. “Going to school and going other places all took place on a bike growing up,” the Dalton Gardens resident said. Baillie bought his first mountain bike when they were first introduced in 1981.

When he moved to the North Idaho area in 2000, he knew he had work to do. First, find some local trails to hike and ride on with his mountain bike. Second, find an active community for not only support, but also one that could aid in his mission to improve existing trails and build more sustainable trails in the region.

Baillie, a spry 75, had twice lived in Prescott, Ariz., while working as a professor at a local college, and during his second stint, he was instrumental in building a trail system that surrounds most of the town.

Baillie is also a climber of international renown, being part of the first Canadian expedition to summit Mount Everest, and was part of a three-man team that first climbed the sea stack Old Man of Hoy off the coast of Scotland in 1966. Oh, he’s also been to the top of The Eiger in the Bernese Alps.

After moving to the Calgary area and working at the University of Calgary, Baillie’s love of outdoors continued. A move back to Prescott in 1988 made him miss the trails he had to ride and hike on in Canada, so he put in the effort to get a trail building culture going in the area.

When it was time to retire, Baillie found himself moving to North Idaho be near his two daughters and their families.

“I saw an article about the Boy Scouts working on a trail in The Press,” Baillie said. “I was desperately looking for trails to ride when I got here. It took me awhile to find the area and when I did I hiked up a ways and saw a few trails, but I knew the location had so much more potential, and I said, ‘Hmmm, I’d better start digging.’”

Later, Baillie saw some of the neighborhood kids gathering on mountain bikes and asked where they were going. He was welcome to join, they said, and again he wound up traversing Canfield Natural Area. Baillie said the kids tended to be a little out of control, but he could see they were enjoying the area despite the shortcomings of its design.

Baillie has stayed the course for the last decade or so, improving trails on the west side on Canfield Mountain, the Canfield Natural Area and Q’emiln Park in Post Falls. He continued working on the trail system on his own, and at times he coerced some of his family to join him on a ride, and when they got to the Canfield Natural Area, he’d pull out some hand tools and draft them into a labor crew.

“I knew we needed to get organized, and I tried to get everyone together, and at the time I was still the outsider here. In those days people were much more competitive individually, there wasn’t much of a sense of community in the biking industry — people just went and did what they wanted to do.”

The first organization Baillie was affiliated with was NITRA (North Idaho Trail Riders), which morphed into the Lake City Trail Building Association, and eventually ended up with the Forest Service contract to manage the trails in the Beauty Creek area. “That has been their main job — keeping those trails in excellent shape’” he said. “They had chosen a certain amount that they could manage, but it didn’t include the trails that I rode a lot, so we had to form a different group.”

Baillie tried to put a program together through Lake City High School “but it didn’t stick. After that, I was a personal little club for a while.” He eventually secured a two-year Forest Service contract, which ended in 2014.

“The Service was trying to come up with a new process where they contracted out and assigned trails to certain entities, back when Andy Boggs was in charge there. He could pack a horse, throw a diamond hitch, pound a sledgehammer and really knew his stuff out here,” Baillie said.

Baillie was basically working for Andy, but when Andy retired, things changed. “The first thing the Service did was try to shut down some trails, so they wouldn’t have to pay for them. Suddenly we got notices they were going to shut down the trails a few years ago, and that’s when we got more involved with the city’s parks and rec department.”

From that experience, Baillie could see what was happening and the bleak future in store for the area. “The younger mountain bikers weren’t following the rules of mountain biking. ‘Slowly and in control’ are incompatible with the word ‘kid,’ so it had to lead to problems.”

Baillie was beginning to realize the popularity of mountain biking and also the popularity of Coeur d’Alene were on a collision course. “We have this amazing area with amazing weather — and it’s no longer a secret.” Baillie said when he first came here Coeur d’Alene was a sleepy little place, no real problems, everyone got along. Just like the old days. “I got a couple years of the old days here before Bam! we are into confrontation. We had to get serious and get organized — You can’t work with the Forest Service unless you are diplomatic and can represent a viable organization.”

In the meantime, the community and the mountain bikers were also evolving. “And this time it kind of clicked, and we now have leaders that are thinking more of the community rather than survival and self-interest, and so that was nice and that is when we formed this new group (Idaho Panhandle Mountain Bike Alliance) and we’re lucky enough to have someone who can run the social media and start to do some organizing. We are still a small community here in Coeur d’Alene as far as volunteers.

A website for the IPBMA is in the works.

“The guys who have studied that say you need about 200,000 people to be able to sustain a volunteer organization, with officers and membership and, what are we here, maybe 40,000? So it is difficult for us to find the volunteers we need.”

Baillie’s new group is focused currently on improving existing trail and adding sustainable trails for hiking and biking on the Canfield Natural Area.

“The trail the Boy Scouts put in was not well thought out. For one, it’s too steep in many places, and susceptible to erosion,” he said.

The organization’s plan is to improve hiking access by lessening the grade on existing trails, and adding trails for mountain bikes to use on descent, in order to avoid collisions with hikers.

Rusty is a passionate, hard-working “salt of the Earth” type of guy, Shane Myr, general manager of Two-Wheeler Dealer in Hayden, who met Baillie at his shop and has volunteered with the new group. “They don’t make many like him anymore.”

This group means more progress for the mountain bike community in our area.

I have been able to attend the first three trail building days, held on Sundays during this past summer. We had a large enough crew to haul large timbers to shore up areas where erosion had taken over, and also to support redesigned switchbacks.

The crew has also been busy improving trails and “roughing in” trails both near the base and toward the top.

I’ve learned a lot about how to build trails, but more importantly how to do it safely and correctly.

Baillie said it’s fun to build trails but you also have to have someone to do the unpleasant work — filing permits organizing the membership and affiliate yourself through proper networking and the like. “But if all that doesn’t happen, the good stuff cannot occur,” he said. “It looks like we are going to make it this time. If we are really smart and lucky, and do our due diligence, we have a good chance.”

Another key individual is Coeur d’Alene Trails Coordinator Monte McCully.

“I met him right here the base of the (Natural Area) in 2005.” One day Baillie came to ride and there was a long table piled high with tons of food and drink, and Monte had recruited a Mormon church congregation. “And when they settled the West, build a church or whatever, they have their support system in place and the guys were up on the hill digging rock,” Baillie said. “I didn’t find Monte until I got near the top and he was swinging a Pulaski. We started a conversation about the area and the second time I ran into him, he had a small trackhoe part way up the hill, working on switchbacks. He was trying to fix the trails that the Boy Scouts had put in, with good intentions, but they were not built with sustainability in mind.”

Baillie said eventually the two of them sat down and talked about this trail and made a plan to improve the system and make it more maintainable.

“Monte has the big picture in focus and as the trail coordinator, we have always worked through him.” Baillie said McCully has taken the group’s ideas and looked at them to see if they would actually work. “He also has a lot of resources, like GPS for instance. That allows us to overcome any property issue we come across with adjacent landowners. He has the big picture in focus, and every so often we have a possibility that a developer can work with the city.”

“When I first started at the city 10 years ago, the Canfield Natural Area had just been gifted to the city and no trails, other than old Jeep trails, existed on the hillside,” McCully said. “Over the next four years we used volunteer labor to construct the trail system on Canfield. We designed the trails for hiking but allowed mountain biking as well.”

McCully said once it became apparent the trail system was hugely popular to both user groups, they started looking at ways to make it more user friendly to both groups.

“Rusty has been involved with the trail for quite a few years now and he and several other members of the mountain biking community have spent many hours working on ways to make the trail system better. He wrote up a plan to advise us on how to improve the trail system and volunteered to work on the trail. The plan involves making the bike trail one way to make it safer, realigning different parts of the trail that are more user friendly, closing down the old Jeep roads, and moving the technical course from off the adjacent private property and into the city owned property on Canfield.

“We love working with Rusty and his group and fully support the work he is doing.”