Getting High

My fascination with the old and storied trails of the North Shore begins at The Flying Circus. I first learned about the trail from Steve, who owned a gear shop where I used to work. He told us about it on a slow summer afternoon, after I asked him what the riding was like during those early days on the Shore. The picture Steve painted was one of dizzying skinnies, cantilever brakes, and suffocating layers of hockey pads. He rode it once and never again, which he held to be a respectable track record. The reverent way he described it inclined me to agree with him.

Eager to learn more, I dug up this old gem from right here at NSMB. The short documentary was a visual reference for Steve’s tales of the Circus, which was far more ridiculous than I could’ve imagined. The endless wooden ladders were stilted fifteen or twenty feet in the air, guarded by steep ramps and tight corners. There was a teeter-totter, of all things, balanced precariously in the middle, followed by a massive, massive drop, with what could only generously be called a landing. The ingenuity of it all, the ambition. It was incredible.

I started this project determined to go and see the Flying Circus in person and properly fathom the scale of it all. It was a pilgrimage of sorts. I already knew what I would find in the woods on Mt. Fromme; I didn’t expect a different ghost to rear its rotted head in the process. That head belonged to another trail, predecessor of the Flying Circus.

From my young and modern perspective, it’s easy to assume all the old trails existed in one frenzied moment of North Shore history. In one sense that’s true, because they’re all part of the same lineage, but in many others it’s not. “Dangerous” Dan Cowan, architect, engineer, and test dummy of the Flying Circus, told me as much when we spoke about the old days. To me, the Circus was the beginning of the history I’m excavating. To Dan, it was the end of a chapter they’d been writing for years already. That chapter starts with A Walk in the Clouds.

This is an old ghost, to be sure. Dan started building the trail in the mid 90s, right as they figured out the secrets of skinnies and ladder bridges. He told me there wasn’t much in the way of terrain or natural features on the trail; the woodwork was the trail. When I asked Cam about the trail, he was skeptical as to whether there would be anything left of it. Jerry Willows had similar doubts, noting how A Walk in the Clouds was already falling into the forest by the time he started work on Jerry Rig. That challenge was enough to convince me: I would make my pilgrimage to the Flying Circus, but my real goal was to find the remnants of A Walk in the Clouds, no matter how small and unspectacular.

So how did I go about finding a trail consumed by the forest? I took a scientific wild-ass guess. I SWAGged it. This is Jerry’s word for how they knew the stunts they built would work. They didn’t, not really, but they had a good hunch backed up by science. Sort of. Equipped with a vague old map and a poor sense of direction, I set out to SWAG where A Walk in the Clouds may have started. This involved a lot of back-and-forth along a stretch of road at the top of Fromme, some brief but unsuccessful forays into the curtain of trees, and much toggling between a number of maps, new and old. I found plenty of other good stuff, but I didn’t find A Walk in the Clouds. Not even a trace of it.

Having exhausted my patience searching for the top of the trail, I changed tack. The old map suggested A Walk in the Clouds ended somewhere near the top of Upper Oilcan and The Flying Circus. Only Upper Oilcan is still marked, so that’s where I began with more of the same. Ditch the bike, wander back and forth peering into the snarl of foliage. The uphill side of the road at Fromme is bordered by a narrow and deep ditch, from which a steep and eroded wall rises into the forest itself. I tell you this so you can understand that it makes for fairly visible trail exits, which have to somehow navigate over the ditch or do so at one of its shallower points. There were no such exits on the hillside above Upper Oilcan, nor anything else that might indicate where a trail once ran.

Undaunted, I hoofed up into the woods and started looking for something, anything, that could be evidence of the old trail. I wasn’t even sure what I should be looking for – maybe some old woodwork, or a small pile of earth that could be a takeoff or landing. Then, a little way up the hill and tucked behind heavy overgrowth, I saw it. A single plank of wood, no longer than a couple feet, nailed to the downhill side of a long-fallen tree.

This was not just deadfall but a solution to the problem of getting up and over the log, held in place by two sturdy and rusted nails hammered in long, long ago. There was no doubt I was looking at A Walk in the Clouds. On the uphill side of the log, I found another skinny meant to get riders up onto the log. Just a little further up in the trees, a longer plank of wood descended from the jagged crown of an old stump. With these three features, I had a trail on my hands.

It quickly became apparent that the old map was not entirely accurate. The trail zigged and zagged unpredictably, so my search became something like an avalanche rescue scenario. I slowly ascended the hillside in wide switchbacks, scanning for evidence. The old trail appeared haphazardly, in small, often disconnected sections. Most of what I found were ladder bridges that had succumbed to the whims of gravity. They lay half-buried in the moss and needles like backbones, stripped clean and covered with a patina of lichen. Like some ancient beast had once crawled up this hillside and laid down here for the long rest.

It was difficult to imagine what the actual riding was like. I had no sense of how the bridges were once supported, whether they were two feet off the ground or twenty. I couldn’t tell where they were connected by dirt, if at all. According to Dan, the stunts were standard, or what would soon become standard for North Shore woodwork. There were skinny log rides, long elevated bridges, a teeter-totter, and wheelie drops. Lots of wheelie drops. There was enough woodwork to earn A Walk in the Clouds another name: A Shitload of Nails.

I properly lost the trail about halfway up, but I found a few final bridges just below the upper road. There was no discernible beginning, no sign of the first move, which was a six-foot wheelie drop to flat called “the pit.” I’d hoped to find a trail sign, but no dice there either. Once I exited onto the gravel road, I could only guess at where the trail had started. The forest pulled its curtain closed and A Walk in the Clouds was once again lost to the ravages of time. I wandered down in a daze, anxious to get back to where I’d stashed my bike.

The rest of my ride took me down the Flying Circus, still standing in all its ludicrous glory. Everything is truly higher in person, and narrower, and more ridiculous. If I squint, I can see Dangerous Dan high up in the trees, knees bent out seeking a sliver of balance, handlebars sneaking past the upper trunks of trees. I imagine what a long fall to the ground would look like, what it would do to a bike or a body. I imagine the triumph of making it to the end. I love the ingenuity of it, the months of work, the brilliance to build something so ambitious, so unheard of.

The Flying Circus brought me to the upper reaches of Mt Fromme, where I found it to be a real and indescribable thing. I stood slack-jawed below the Ridiculator, the most outlandish structure on the whole trail. I walked among the remnants of this trail that dominates the history of the Shore, and all I could think about was the moment when I first glimpsed A Walk in the Clouds. That plank of wood, peeking out from up in the trees. That ancient ghost.

Like the Flying Circus, some myths tell their own story. They are massive and imposing, and they dominate our histories, but other myths need a little help along the way. They need someone to come by and peel back the curtain, push them back out into the world for a brief moment so we don’t forget what might be lesser known. I don’t expect many people to go and find A Walk in the Clouds. There isn’t much to see, to be honest, other than a shitload of nails and some old planks of wood, but next time you pedal up the road at Mt. Fromme, look up and into the woods. Know the old ghosts are still there, waiting for us to find them.