Dirt Fest West Virginia: A Perfect Summer Weekend

Words and Photos by Brett Rothmeyer

There’s a certain romance to summer living in the Northeast. Winter can be long and cruel; spring often teases you with a warm day here and there, but only when it’s not raining or just above freezing. I remember being 13, and those first few warm days of summer gave promise to long days of unending mischief. The school year would soon be over for the year and swimming and skateboarding were top on the to-do list. There was one summer in particular that we went to Ocean City, MD for a family vacation. Each morning my brother and I woke up, hammered down some sugary breakfast of donuts or pop-tarts and headed for the trolley bus. Knee pads around our ankles, helmets in hand, we pushed the remaining few blocks to 2^nd and Ocean just as the gate was being unlocked to the Ocean Bowl Skatepark.

The Ocean Bowl was our first real experience at a skatepark, and we were hooked. For seven days we spent the bulk of our mornings and afternoons learning how to carve around the blue concrete bowl. We stared in awe of the talented locals making everything look easy. When we exhausted ourselves we headed towards the boardwalk for a nutritious lunch of Thrasher Fries (a coincidence for sure but no relation to the magazine). Fresh cut potato fried in peanut oil, mounding over a paper cup, soaked in malt vinegar, we settled on the concrete wall looking over towards the Atlantic Ocean as seagulls hovered, waiting for a fry or two to fall out of our grasps. In the evenings, we loitered outside the Chat Street skate shop with a group of punks and skaters and general vagrants. Our young minds were being exposed to so much and we were taking it all in.

As I crawled out of my tent to the hum of conversation amongst the campers of Big Bear Lake, a strange yet familiar feeling entered my mind: summer! Surrounded by a few thousand mountain bikers all waiting to get into the woods to ride the trails of Big Bear, it felt oddly similar to the anxiousness of getting to the skate park as a young teen. While breakfast was a less sugar-filled ordeal, the purpose was the same—to get going as quickly as possible. A group of teenage boys was camped nearby and each morning they awoke with a buzz, gearing up and heading out for a day on the trails. I would watch them speed off each day and couldn’t help but think that Dirt Fest was their Ocean Bowl. Throughout the weekend our paths would cross and they would always be on the bike with their helmets on. It seemed that they rarely stopped riding other than to sleep at the end of the day.

One part perfect weather, one part perfect trails, this year’s Dirt Fest West Virginia has taken up residence in my heart for what a great summer should be.  The trails at Big Bear were not unlike my experience at the Ocean Bowl so long ago. Every morning I was excited to see how far I could extend my comfort level on the technical rock features. A fine mix of flow and burly, steep climbs and ripping downhills, it was hard not to love this terrain. There were no Thrasher Fries to eat after a day of riding but there was plenty of pizza and burritos cooked up by Doan’s Bones BBQ. There were live bands, and rides hosted by various vendors. The folks at Surly kept it weird with a bit of a bicycle biathlon and Transition Cycles took a rowdy group out to send some of the more rawkus trails at dusk. I loved seeing the vendors gather at the end of every afternoon to sneak out for a ride before the sun descended and the firepit lit the night sky. Our friends at Pivot hosted a good old fashioned cookout with our official hypemen of Dirt Fest, Chainsaw Don and Dunk, manning the grill. While my age states the contrary, I left the campground of Big Bear Lake drenched in more than just the afternoon rains but also in the romance of summer. A weekend like Dirt Fest West Virginia can’t last forever, and perhaps that’s the charm of the memory— a brief and fleeting moment of a perfect weekend of friends and bikes.

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