Gravel Culture: Doing the knowledge
Posted By Gravel Union
On 30 June 2020
We look into the cloak&dagger world of trading gravelly trail knowledge. How do you find out where the trail treasure is buried, yet manage to avoid being frazzled by the fire-breathing dragons on your journey?
When I was a kid, there was a thriving underground stock exchange being operated in my school. It had some well-established rules, an unwritten hierarchy and even a complaints & grievance system.
Our currency was bartering. No actual cash changed hands, but there were regular exchanges of physical goods. Marbles were “top dog” for a while, but we also traded in Lego, toy cars, Star Wars figures, football cards, sweets and novelty items (whoopy cushions were the “hot ticket” for a period). As junior traders we learnt the value of a commodity, the skill of negotiating and the art of holding your best cards close to your chest. Not bad for a bunch of 9 year olds.
Skip forward quite a few decades to current times and I’m back in the stock exchange game. I’m not dealing in plastic figurines or flying saucer sweets now though. I’m dealing in knowledge. Gravel trail knowledge to be precise.
The Covid19 lockdown (in the UK at least) meant one thing for gravel riders – riding from your door. We weren’t supposed to drive anywhere for our daily exercise and we had to keep our rides relatively short and gnar-free. Like many gravel fans I suspect, I’d got used to driving out of the city to start my rides. Using fossil fuel power meant I had a much greater range of ride locations, styles and levels of difficulty. It meant I could select where the weather looked sunniest or where I knew the trails would be in the best condition. It also meant I didn’t have to ride the first 10-20kms of potentially underwhelming trails to get to the good stuff. I wanted my gravel trail “fix” easily – I’d become addicted to instant satisfaction.
But then, literally overnight, everything changed. This posed a quandary – how were we as gravel riders going to get a hit of the good stuff if we were stuck riding from home? Suddenly local trail knowledge became the tradable commodity – if you knew of one killer section of gravel trail that could be added into a route, or that could be used to avoid some hideous tarmac, then you were suddenly king-of-the-gravel-castle. All my local gravel riding buddies dusted off our bartering skills and more importantly blew the metaphorical cobwebs off our local trail knowledge and started planning stay-local routes. And then we started trading. The gravel trail knowledge market place was open for business.
In the current Brexit-dominated world, there’s not much (in my view anyway) that a British gravel rider can feel justifiably proud of when thinking about life in Britain. But the one thing we can puff our chests out over is the quality of our mapping. The Ordnance Survey have been mapping our world since at least 1745 and the accuracy and detail of modern OS maps is mind boggling.
The problem is though, that the cartographers at OS obviously aren’t gravel riders. Their maps show us what’s legal to ride, but they don’t show us what the trail is like to ride – will it be gravel heaven or will it be bog-schlepping hell? As a map aficionado you learn to read the map – trying to identify features that might impact the trail such as the surrounding topography, looking for boggy areas, closely-packed contour lines and water courses, but it’s still not easy to always spot exactly how the trail will ride on the ground.
In the current era, using a paper map might be regarded as a bit old fashioned – surely the ability to conjure up digital trails, complete with satellite imagery and street view perspectives is the way forward? What about using the power of Artificial Intelligence to help plan your gravel route?
Obviously, as a gravel rider hunting for the best trails you should try and use all of the tools available to you. But in my opinion, the best is the simplest one – personal recommendation. It might be a roughly drawn squiggle on a piece of crumpled paper handed over to you and shoved hastily in your jersey pocket. It might be a link to a highly recommended section of trail on Strava. Or, best of all, it might be a (socially distanced) ride with a good friend where they actually show you their new find in person.
Before a London cab driver can get their licence, they have to go through an archaic process known as “doing the knowledge” First introduced in 1865, the system was put in place to ensure that qualified cab drivers knew all the roads in a 6 mile/10 km radius of a specific place and not only did they have to know the roads, but they had to know the perfect route to get from A to B, no matter the time of day, state of the traffic or how heavily it was raining.
As gravel riders, that knowledge is what we use to turn an OK ride into an amazing ride. How best to link certain sections of trail together? Where to find the finest weather-proof riding? How to help plaster a perfect gravel-rider’s grin across the faces of our riding buddies?
During the spring 2020 lockdown, gravel knowledge was like gold-dust among my gravel riding friends. “Have you tried this bit….” or “I’ve found a brilliant link between….” And even “I’ve sent you a GPX file – I think you’ll approve of this…”. One tiny section of gravel trail can revolutionise an entire route – it might just help you bypass a horrible road junction or it could be a fully-formed perfectly flowing gravel trail. Home-drawn trail “heatmaps” were drawn. Mental notes were made. GPX files were subtly edited to add in new gems and cast aside unwanted gravel trail fluff. “Here be treasure” is now scribbled across our collective trail knowledge, to counteract the existing “Here be dragons”
What will be interesting is to see is what will happen when lockdown is released? Will we continue to ride local or will the draw of exotic gravelly treasure in foreign lands prove to be too strong a pull? No matter where we end up riding, I feel sure that gravelly trail knowledge will still be a valuable commodity and one forever worth seeking out and trading in your best toy soldiers to get hold of.