AUSTIN, Texas – Bike shops across Central Texas are seeing more customers as people try new hobbies amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mountain biking is more than just a hobby for Seth Buckner, though. He has been riding for over 10 years and building trails for the past four.

“I quit drinking alcohol in 2017 and I think that’s whenever trail-digging really took off because I was using this as an outlet,” he said.

Trail building has been an outlet that’s given Buckner, the man behind Victory Racing Events, some notoriety among the mountain biking community. He says Texas doesn’t have many challenging altitudes like other states, but the state's topography is its own challenge.

“Texas is a particularly difficult place to ride because there’s so much marble-y, loose rock on top of hard packs, so it’s kinda hard to learn the traction and ride the trails here,” he said.

Creating trails is a physically intensive practice, he says, usually spanning several weeks and months. One of his biggest projects has been roughly five years in the making.

“I’ll just kinda crawl my way through the woods and bushwhack through the woods and mark where I go with a breadcrumb trail. And then when I have that taped and marked off I’ll put that GPS recording on a map,” he said.

The process is methodical: it requires multiple hikes across uncharted terrain, flagging potentially navigable trails, and finally some elbow grease.

“Pretty much when I’m happy with the flagging, I’ll start with a chainsaw or a cutting tool and just start clearing the vegetation and making it a walkable path. And then once it’s a walkable path, you’re not getting hit by branches or whatever, then we start preparing the ground, whether it’s bench-cutting with a pick axe or using a leaf blower,” he says.

For Buckner, discovering this passion and throwing himself entirely in it has been critical in his journey of alcohol sobriety.

“I don’t think I would’ve been able to do that if I had all the free time on my hands so this was just a really easy way for me to come out and blow off steam or meditate and be away from all the life stuff, being out here in the woods,” he said.

Article image courtesy: Justin Vaughn