When riders start arriving at Bromont and Mont Blanc at the end of June it will mark the start of 30 years for Dirt Camp. Those two camps are just the first two of another summer full of week-long riding camps spread across five mountains surrounding Quebec City. At the helm, as he has been since the start back in 1996, is Jeff Silas.
30 years is a long time for any business, let alone a camp in a sport so new as mountain biking. But when I catch up with Jeff over the phone, he sounds as full of youthful enthusiasm as ever. That could be because, after a few years mostly behind the desk organising the camps, he’s stepped back into the fray as an on-the-ground coach.
“Man, it was so fun! With adults, I don’t know if I’d be so stoked. But with kids? It was so fun,” Silas enthuses. “When you get them over a bit step-up that they were really scared of all week? They’re elated, like, the kid can’t even contain himself. That’s it. It makes the whole week worth it.”
Riding the waves in an ever-changing sport
Dirt Camp includes options for more cross-country focused weeks and, as you might have guessed from the above, more gravity focused camps at locations like Bromont and Mont Blanc. Silas says the skill of the riders he sees now compared to when he started running camps is impressive.
“They’re getting so good so early. The most advanced groups we have? I can ride with them, but I don’t try impress them,” Silas admits freely. “They grew up in this era of big bikes and nicely built jumps, reliable suspension, you know?”
The massive change in rider ability is just one of the many shifts Silas’s seen in the sport since he started. Suspension, trail design, riding styles, boom and bust cycles in the industry, Dirt Camps rolled with it all.One of the bigger changes Silas sees is in the demographic of the parents.
“Through 2005-07, when downhill was going through a big boom, we were super busy. After that, it slumped. And then after that? It became a family sport. Suddenly, in like 2015, parents are showing up with their bike and their kids bike on the back of the car. For almost every family that signs up for camp, parents are riding in some capacity. It’s very cool. It became skiing.”
Blazing trails in singletrack
Becoming skiing sounds better than the usual refrain, that its becoming like golf. But whatever sport you compare mountain biking too, it wasn’t like that in the 90s. The sport was new and it was very much still a wild west. Silas first started instructing by helping out a “Introduction to Mountain Biking” CGEP course as a mechanic. By the end of the first course, he was doing most of the teaching. Then he taught another. And another.
“Eventually, I wrote the manual for the class,” Silas tells.
That turned into a job helping run a camp for younger riders in the early 90s but, when that fizzled out, the prior owner handed the keys to Silas, saying “You’re the heart and soul of this thing, so go do it.” That was in 1996. Silas was still just 20 years old. While there was no curriculum to follow, beyond the one he wrote for the CGEP course, and no formal guidelines, Silas says it all came easy.
“I understood that it needed to be progressive, that choosing the right terrain was the name of the game. I mean, I made some mistakes. And maybe I don’t have all the right answers, but it was all very natural to me. Maybe I have that pedagogical thing in me. I just felt like, why aren’t more people doing this?”
“For me, that’s the definition of mountain biking”
That curriculum is very much focused on basic skills. “We’re not trying to create reckless riders. Just because you survived a trail doesn’t mean you did the trail. Show me your tires weren’t skidding all over the place, you weren’t over-breaking like crazy, then you’ll have my admiration. Show me you can be light on your bike on the trail, that you can pop some stuff along the way, you can do some high-lines here and there, that you can be super calm,.”
As you can maybe start to see in that description, Dirt Camp isn’t, like many youth camps, focused on racing. Instead, the program is squarely focused on the culture of mountain biking.
“Racing is a tangent of mountain biking. Racing is great, I race once every year. But for us, it’s about the sport, it’s about the community,” Silas says. “It’s about party laps. You know, a bunch of pals doing a trail they’re comfortable with, hollering the entire way down, stoked with whatever the guy in front of them did. For me me, that’s the definition of mountain biking.”
Maybe that’s why, three decades later, Silas is still doing it with such genuine enthusiasm.
New venues, same focus
The latest change came with the pandemic. Silas says Dirt Camp had to shift to day camps from nearly exclusively boarders. While more riders are getting back into boarding, there’s still a lot more sticking to day camp.
“That worked out in the end, of course. The pandemic was really good to us, right? Everyone threw themselves into mountain biking,” Silas says. While the rest of the industry might be struggling with the aftermath, and registration has trailed off a bit, it inspired Dirt Camp to expand beyond Bromont.
“Now we’re at these locations that have chairlifts, but they might not have the resources to have a mountain bike school. They see the value in what we’re doing. It’s not that I make or break their year, but, for example, there are times at Mont Blanc where we’re the only people on the mountain on a Tuesday afternoon. It brings a bit of life to their place.”
As Dirt Camp expands to include newer venues, ones that don’t have the same storied history as Bromont, a legacy often tied to racing, the emphasis on riding culture Silas prioritises over speed seems prescient.
“I’m 50. I look at the trail very differently than a 12 year old. I want to look and find all the secret jumps. These kids just want to go as fast as they can,” Silas says. “I look at that and think, you’re missing the point, you know? There’s a whole dimension to the sport that you are just eclipsing. You can wear your racer hat, but you can also wear your flow hat, and your jibbing hat. There’s just so much to this sport.”