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ISSUE 44, 15 September 2026
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Welcome back to The Bend!
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The Bend follows a simple rhythm each week. The Eddy Line opens with a one-line thought or
observation, something short enough to remember but worth thinking
about. What the Current Pulled Toward dives a
little deeper into where the previous week’s energy went, whether that’s
a project, a partnership, or a personal lesson learned. Signal Fire highlights a person, place, or initiative
that deserves some attention. From the
Field, shares a small anecdote about the broader outdoor
recreation economy from Oxbow’s non-profit arm, the VA
MTNS Outdoor Collective. And One Thought Worth
Sitting With closes things out with a brief reflection or quote
that will hopefully help guide you through whatever you may be dealing
with.
It’s part journal, part field note, and hopefully
something that makes you pause for a moment before diving back into the
current.
Author’s note: the views, opinions, and observations
expressed in The Bend
are my own and do not represent any employer, public agency,
organization, or individual. Where applicable, they reflect only my work
through Oxbow Strategies and the VA MTNS Outdoor Collective.
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“The bigger picture rarely fits inside
a single rule.“
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What the Current Pulled Toward
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This week the current pulled toward
shortsightedness.
A colleague and I were recently talking
about the difference between building something new versus taking care
of what you already have. I used a pretty
simple analogy: you probably wouldn’t build an addition onto your house
while the roof is leaking. You fix the roof
first. At least, that was my point.
The more I thought about it afterward, though,
the more I realized that even that example is not as absolute as it
sounds. Let’s consider for a minute that maybe
the addition solves a problem the house has had for years. Maybe there’s
funding available for one project but not the other. Maybe the timing is
super important and postponing the addition means losing an opportunity
that will not come back.
Ideally, yes,
you fix the roof and then build the addition but real life rarely organizes itself that neatly. That’s where rigidity can become its own kind of
shortsightedness.
I’ve known people
over the years who were so committed to a single principle, process, or
idea of how things were supposed to happen, that they lost complete
sight of everything around it. Full disclosure,
I used to be much closer to that person myself. There was a time when I believed consistency meant never
bending. If something was right, then it was right in every
circumstance. If there was a process, I followed it. If there was a
priority, I stuck with it.
Experience
has made me a lot less certain of absolutes. Don’t get me wrong,
there are still lines worth holding and there
are still times when compromise becomes an excuse for avoiding the
harder decision. But there are also moments when a little flexibility
preserves something more important than whatever we were trying so hard
to protect in the first place.
I can
think back on several points in my own career where a slightly different
conversation, a little more patience, or a willingness to give just an
inch might have changed what came next. In hindsight, not every disagreement needed a winner and not every detour meant abandoning the destination. Perhaps most
importantly, not every imperfect step
represented a failure. That’s the part that I
think I appreciate more now than I did years ago.
With that in mind, progress is rarely linear for most folks.
Sometimes we move forward. Sometimes we circle
back. Sometimes we just have to temporarily tolerate something we would
rather fix because a larger opportunity could be sitting in front of us
just out of sight. When we’re faced with this kind situation, it helps
to remember that we’re not completely ignoring saving the roof, we just
recognize there could be more than one thing worth saving.
- Mike.
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The
International Mountain
Bicycling Association (IMBA) has been
advocating for mountain bike access since 1988, but its work today
extends well beyond simply trying to open more trails. Its mission is to
create, enhance and protect great places to ride, with a particular
focus on putting quality trails closer to where people live. IMBA works
with communities on advocacy, planning, design, construction, education
and stewardship.
That breadth is what
makes the organization worth recognizing. A
successful trail system rarely begins with someone showing up with a
shovel and a rake. It usually starts years earlier with relationships,
land access, public support, planning, funding, and people willing to
stay with the idea long enough to make it real.
IMBA helps communities navigate all of those pieces.
Its Trail Accelerator Grant program, for
example, supports communities with professional planning, design, and
education so local trail ideas have a better chance of becoming
sustainable projects.
Trails may be
the visible result but so much of the important
work happens long before anyone rides them.
To learn more about IMBA
click
here.
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One of the most useful things a national
organization can do is help local communities get past the point where a
good idea stalls. Case in point: IMBA’s Trail
Accelerator Grant program.
Since the
program began, IMBA has invested
$675,000 across 48
communities, and those grants helped leverage roughly
$14 million in local
support. If you ask me, that’s a pretty
remarkable multiplier.
The initial
investment may pay for planning, design, or organizational capacity, but
the effect can continue well beyond the original grant. A professional
trail plan can help a community secure larger public grants. Better
planning can attract private support. Stronger local organizations can
maintain momentum after the first funding cycle ends. And once the trails are built, the economic impact becomes
much, much broader.
A 2025 report from
IMBA and the Trust for Public Land reviewed 13 mountain biking
destinations and found trail networks supporting as many as
1,626 jobs and $54.1
million in annual labor income across the communities studied.
That’s why national investment is important
locally.
The check or technical
assistance may originate somewhere else but the
bike shop, restaurant, hotel, trail crew and tax revenue usually
doesn’t.
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One Thought Worth Sitting With
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This week’s theme: Shortsightedness.
“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject
from various points of view.“
-George Eliot
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