The Paha Sapa Trails website started in concept sometime during the 2010 riding season. Prior to that, I, Samuel J. Greear, moved back to the Black Hills in early 2009. The Black Hills is where I was raised and I was an avid cyclist in my youth, riding religiously and racing competitively in the BHMBA (Black Hills Mountain Bike Association) series race in the mid-1990's, before I was even a teenager. During 2009 I was really starting over in mountain biking, not having ridden off-road in well over ten years. The local trails I remembered from my youth were in many cases largely changed or had disappeared into memory. In the rest of the cases the trails that remained went largely unridden, as it seems the perspective of acceptable mountain biking terrain had changed with time as well. Having to start over in my quest for new places to ride throughout the Black Hills was somewhat frustrating, it seemed that many people were willing to divulge semi- accurate directions verbally but by and large the best mountain biking in the area was almost completely undocumented. While most of the trails in the hills are on US Forest Service property and the Forest Service does maintain and document a large number of trails and trail networks, in many cases these documented trails nowhere near as good as those that are undocumented. Probably this all just boils down to a bit of history, trails and networks must exist for a reasonable period of time before the Forest Service will recognize them as official trails. Back when the current recognized trails were being developed, trails were simply created differently, with less attention to grade and potential erosion issues. As a result many of the well known and documented trails in the Black Hills, while great trails are the more steep and eroded trails in the area.
Having discovered that there were hundreds of miles of amazing single track winding through the Black Hills, most of it connected in some way or another, and that finding much of it took months of diligent searching to find in plain sight, I decided in early 2010 that some form of online guide or annual was an absolute necessity. I began without much of a plan in the summer of 2010 by simply riding with my GPS, a Garmin Edge 305, and making sure I rode every foot of trail at the different places where I ride. I assumed initially that it would be quite trivial to prepare this raw data and publish it online. My confidence in this area stemmed from the fact that I have over 10 years of professional experience as a web developer, engineer and architect. This meant building the website and writing whatever software I required was essentially a non- issue, but I wouldn't learn until the winter of 2010 how detrimental my lack of geospatial/global positioning knowledge would be.
During Christmas break of the spring semester at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where I am currently seeking a degree in Applied and Computational Mathematics, I began working on the website. This was largely uneventful until it came to things like providing accurate elevation change statistics and a few other features that are problematic and closely tied to the way consumer GPS devices work. This feature and some of the others are on the website currently in a quite reasonable form, but research continues on how to improve them. Being a bit of a perfectionist, the website may still not be online or taking traffic today, as it is still (as of May 2011) a bit sparse on features and descriptions in the creators opinion. However, I decided to work tirelessly on the site over my vacation and rush it online toward the end of December 2010 as a result of the promise of generous financial assistance by one of the local bicycle dealers in Rapid City. This support never materialized but has caused the site you see today, imperfect but online and evolving. Fortunately, another local business owner stepped up to the plate here. Please stop in and take a look around at Rushmore Mountain Sports if you are ever in the area.
During the development phase I discovered that simply putting data online is only a small piece of the battle in building a website such as this. The bulk of the work lies in providing visitors with the relevant details they are seeking about individual trails and segments of trails, things such as classifications on the type of trail, grade, accurate descriptions of the trail and waypoints, etc. In addition to expanded trail coverage, more detailed descriptions are the primary focus for 2011.
While this page will be updated periodically, more timely and detailed information will be released on the Blog
Getting ready for the Five-O race start and turning the big ring coming into the finish at the 2010 Dakota Five-O.
Doing some reconnaissance on the Deerfield Trail (Trail 40) on May 14, 2011. Photo location is just east of Silver City near the Pactola Lake inlet.