MARK: A free radical as a sole electron that
gets out of a bond and is just kind of floating around all
free and whatnot.
It can do whatever it wants and has a lot of energy behind it.
I'm sure the scientific term is a lot more--
WILL: Yeah, an uncharged molecule.
I just wasn't sure if it was an ion or an electron.
MARK: It's an electron, yeah.
WILL: In chemistries, a radical is an atom, molecule, or ion
that has an unpaired valence electron.
MARK: Nice.
That's 15 years of science and university,
and you still have to fact check.
WILL: [INAUDIBLE] got to do it, but--
MARK: Yeah, which just means it's highly reactive and very
short lived--
typically.
Which is kind of ironic.
[BEEP]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
WILL: I've been in a van for the better part of the last 5-1/2
years.
Mark and I have been living in a vehicle together for the better
part of the last four-and-a-half--
three of which we were sleeping head-to-toe
in a twin bed, which is kind of insane to think about.
- Yeah.
MARK: 2015, I got a job in Prince George.
I moved out from Quebec.
I was just working on some houses,
and was getting too comfortable and wanted to switch it out.
Will had this heinous idea.
He was like, man, move into the van next summer,
and we'll go to South America, race some EWS,
and we'll start some sort of race team.
Because we both thought racing was the only way
to kind of get into the mountain bike industry.
WILL: And I had just did the math
and moving into a van made sense.
And you get rid of the most expensive thing
in the equation, which was his apartment.
And then, you can afford to do everything that you want to do.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARK: In the last three years now,
we've been doing a lot of work with Mountain Biking BC.
That's been our source of income.
So it's been fun to do those projects,
but we've slowly realized that just making, I guess, shreddits
is fun and all, but it does just kind of end, right?
I mean, we both grew up hill building and volunteering
at trail days and, like, spending
time in the woods digging.
And thought it's cool to try and give back and work on the trail
advocacy side of things.
[WHISTLING CALL]
I mean, people ride their bikes on mountain bike trails--
to dumb it down--
and without those mountain bike trails,
you can't mountain bike.
Yes, there are a lot of paid mountain bike trail builders.
But there's also--
I'd say for every one, there's probably three unpaid trail
builders, who don't necessarily want the recognition
but definitely deserve to be recognized
for the efforts they put in.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
WILL: Oh, yeah, that looks [INAUDIBLE]..
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC CHANGES]
MARK: Emptying the poop.
It's not the most glorious job, but we
can't have old Chef Willy getting
his hands dirty before dinner.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[CLATTERING]
[GRUNTING]
[LOUDER GRUNT]
[CLATTERING]
[EXHILARATED SHOUTING]
[INAUDIBLE]
- Yes.
[CLATTERING]
[GRUNTING]
[CLATTERING]
WILL: We're incredibly fortunate in the Sea
to Sky to have this unbelievable mountain bike trail
network, that was largely built on the backs of volunteer
mountain bike builders that did it when it was illegal.
We have a lot of people who were taking a lot of risk
to establish this network, and now the whole region
gets to profit enormously from it.
And I think they forget about the origins of that--
and it's just a bunch people trying to have fun in the woods
with their friends on bikes.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[EXHILARATED SHOUTING]
We really need to give more shits,
because it's really important if you actually
want to ride your bike for your entire life.
Like, land ownership could change or any of these things
could just change, and then we could be without trails.
[FIRE CRACKLING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]