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For Reno riders, getting to the trailhead has always meant one thing: “you had to throw your bike on your bike rack and drive, sometimes through afternoon traffic, to get to the trailhead that you wanted to get to,” according to longtime MTB trail advocate Kevin Joell. But a new 100-mile trail stretching along the Sierra Front is set to change that for over half a million local residents.
Joell has been a mountain bike advocate in the Reno/Tahoe area for over 30 years. He served as both president (three years) and trails director (four years) of the Tahoe Area Mountain Bike Association (TAMBA) and as the VP of the Biggest Little Trail Stewardship (BLTS) in Reno for three. Today, Joell is the owner of Sierra Trail Works and spends his time building high-quality singletrack across the region.
Enter the Sierra Front Trail
The idea for a long-distance foothills trail along the Sierra Front, running roughly from Reno to Genoa, emerged around 2014 at the Eastern Sierra Trails Coalition summit. The regular meeting is a gathering of all the regional trail organizations and land managers. In 2014, they gathered around paper maps and sketched out their dreams for trail connectivity along the Carson Range — the last mountain range of the Sierra Nevada before it meets the Great Basin desert. It was at that meeting that Joell coined the name “Sierra Front Trail,” a name that has since appeared in official Forest Service decision memos. The concept wasn’t without precedent: a 2004 Washoe County open space management plan had already sketched a rough “Foothill route” along the foothills, giving advocates an early justification to push the project forward.
While the entire long-distance route is still conceptual, Joell has been spearheading the development of the easiest-to-complete segments of the trail in collaboration with a number of other local orgs, such as Washoe County, the USFS, and the BLTS. Joell has a good estimate and design for the Washoe County portion of the trail, totaling about 65 miles of new singletrack. He envisions the trail easily reaching the town of Genoa and surpassing 100 miles…