This is a story about my first ride on the North Shore when I was 12, both images were shot the other day by myself. The first is a self portrait shot with a remote shutter release. The other rider is Harookz

Mountain bike trail names are an interesting topic, the North Shore is a good example of this with Cypress, Fromme and Mount Seymour criss-crossed with such gems as “Ned’s Atomic Dustbin”, “Sex Boy”, “Pink Starfish” and a personal favourite of mine; “Bitches Brew.” None though, evoke more horrific mental images then “Severed Dick”. The north shore classic is a staple of any adventure on Mt. Seymour. The trail has evolved from what I am sure was a loamy single track through the forest long before I was born, to its present day state, in which portions of the trail are rutted deep into the hillside.

My first encounter with “Severed Dick” was twelve years ago. I was either eleven or twelve and I was celebrating a friends birthday. All of my friends and I were into mountain biking at this point in our lives, growing up in the Cove we spent most of our free time after school either riding around the neighbourhood, or hanging around in the original Deep Cove bike shop.

A plan was set in motion by one of my good friends, he was to have his birthday party on Mt. Seymour. We would be taken riding by one of his fathers acquaintances. Most of us had never actually ridden the North Shore as almost all of our parents did not ride, but we were sure we knew the trails as well as anyone after watching NSX3 and Shift over and over again.

The invitation card read “note: this wont be an extreme ride”, which at the time was very disappointing to a twelve year who worshiped the north shore EXTREME mountain bike series, regardless, he was ready. The invitation mentioned that we would be riding “Ned’s Atomic Dustbin”, which had very little meaning to me as my mountain bike trail knowledge only extended as far as “Reaper,” “Wild Cherry,” and “the Flying Circus”. It also mentioned that we would climb up the mountain and then ride down. Now for anyone who knows either where “Ned’s” starts, or what it is like to take a group of ten twelve year old’s riding, this was a very clear recipe for disaster. What we (the kids and parents) didn’t realize, was that our guides were almost as inexperienced with the trail network as we were.

Our ride started out of the “Old Buck parking lot”, where we climbed up to the “Bridal Path”. This was our first clear error, yet nobody caught it. Instead of continuing to climb up “Old Buck”, we turned left down the “Bridal Path”, which leads across the mountain, nowhere near our intended trail head. Our guides, unhappy with the lack of climbing, decided that heading onto any trail that seemed to go up, would be a good idea. We picked an entrance that lay straight ahead, it seemed to go in the right direction as it faced up the hill. We began our accent.

It was clear early on that there would be no climbing on this ride. The trail was obviously supposed to be ridden downhill only. I want to add that it was the middle of August so there was a lot of loose soil as well as stones that were making it particularly difficult for most of us, to push our very heavy and in most cases too large (“he’ll grow in to it” – shop salesperson) bikes up the rutted out single-track.

The staggering climb took almost an hour and a half. We got to the top, and with the aid of a sign and a map, our faithful guides were able to acquire their bearings. They informed us that we had just pushed to the top of Severed Dick, which caught most of us off guard as we had never heard that name before. Instantly the thought process consisted of “why was it called severed dick?”, “did some one have their dick severed on the trail?” and more importantly “who?”. Our guides had nary a clue as to the origins of the trail name, they were more interested in how the fuck we ended up where we ended up.

Harookz and Marley near the bottom of Severed

It was then decided that we would ride down the “Baden Powell” and then take “Old Buck” back down to where we started, which is basically the complete opposite of what we had set out to do. I was stoked regardless, I instantly took the lead down the “Baden Powell”, employing a technique where I would loosely hold onto my handle bars, letting them bounce around inside my palms, hoping that this would somehow absorb the bumps in the trail (I was riding a rigid). Within a couple hundred meters I was on my back, in the middle of the trail. I am sure our chaperon was horrified to come around the corner to find a winded twelve year old moaning on the ground. My mother would have been stoked on the sheer level of incompetence that he had shown since the start of the ride, and an injury to me would have been the icing on the cake. I was fine and on my feet catching my breath as the rest of the group arrived. I was quickly informed that I had “tombstoned” which apparently meant I hit a tombstone-like rock that ejected me from my bicycle. At this point I decided that, that saying was lame, and for someone who wanted to absorb more mountain bike culture then anyone, this was justified as it never stuck in my vocab.

We ended up cruising down to Parkgate pretty quickly from there. I do still remember pinning down “Old Buck” for the first time, thinking to myself that the speed chicanes would be a perfect place for a launch ramp to be installed. I am sure we ended the ride with some sort of post ride barbecue, that and cake. Although we never rode “Ned’s Atomic Dustbin” that day, we got to ride the North Shore for the first time. All of us were stoked, with large smiles and the itch to go back up the hill as soon as possible. I don’t think we started riding the mountain without supervision until the next summer, but the real North Shore bug had bitten us all.

I rode Severed the other day, I ride it a couple times a year, and it was in great shape. Modern trail maintenance techniques have been employed and the flow of the trail is better almost every time that I ride it. I still don’t really know the history of the name, and never have really looked into it, I just know that the name continues to shock any newcomer to the shore.