REHAB

[00:00:00] Speaker A: From talking mouths. [00:00:04] Speaker B: So my name is Ian Parker. We are just near the top of Rehab Trail, just about where it intersects with downtown Boogaloo. The most notable thing about this particular spot is it's where Paul Burbage's rigid neck brace, what's left of it, still hangs. Go, squirrel. [00:00:22] Speaker C: I love squirrel. [00:00:24] Speaker B: All right, that's enough. Any kind of rider can have fun on rehab going mostly going down it. But to really ride it well, you have to be a complete rider because there's some technical sections, there's some loose sections, there's some rhythm sections. There's some what I would describe as more pure downhill sections. I really like around the middle, there's a section where it's really all about trying to keep your momentum and keep your flow. And some days you're feeling it, which are kind of rare, but on those days when you're feeling it, it's such a fun trail. So, yeah, riding up it is a unique challenge because if you set your mind to. I'm going to ride as hard as I can from the bottom of Rehab to the top. The first thing is that it's always. You could ride it 30 times, and you will always underestimate how long it is. It's such a long trail, which is a testament to how much work Paul and others put into it. So you kind of. You just absolutely redline for five minutes, and then you start to climb, and you realize that you're in deep trouble and you're not even halfway up the thing to the point that you get. You get up to the last sort of couple hundred meters, and it's the most technical, and it's the steepest section of it. And by then, you've just got lactic acid in your eyelids, like you're hurting so much. It makes it a really unique challenge, to the point that I haven't even tried to ride up it hard in years. [00:01:52] Speaker D: You're listening to Every Trail Tells a Story. In this podcast, we explore the origins of our favorite Yukon trails, guided by the dreamers, planners, bushwhackers, builders, obsessive personalities, and, yes, the rogues who brought these trails to life. In this episode, we head back to White Horse's grey Mountain. Builder Paul Burbage recounts how he got into and out of rehab in record time. This is the story of rehabilitation. [00:03:03] Speaker C: First thing I remember is kind of sitting on the trail with my head in my hands, blood running all over the place. [00:03:14] Speaker A: I think it was his left side of his mouth. He had split it open pretty far. It Kind of had a joker look to him. And his helmet and stuff wasn't in the greatest shape. It was, obviously it hit his head. He was talking, but he, like, wasn't really 100% making sense. [00:03:32] Speaker C: Why are you here? What are you doing here? Who are these people? [00:03:39] Speaker A: So it was two of my friends. So they're a married couple, Jen and Carl. And my brother and I were riding. We had finished the 24 hour daylight bike race. Like that's why we were up there was to visit my brother and then to participate in that race. And then after the race was done, we decided to go for another ride. [00:04:01] Speaker C: The trail is called Hospital Ridge. [00:04:03] Speaker A: Yeah, it's either the Hospital Ridge or the one that's above it. The Long Lake Bridge, I think it's called. During the downhill sections, he would go way ahead of us. And so he was far ahead of us. Like we couldn't see him. Or here. [00:04:17] Speaker C: I'm not sure what happened causing me to crash. It's the low perceived risk, high actual risk when you're going that fast. I was probably tired because I'd been up all night. I probably just touched the side of the trail with my front wheel and just sp. Spun the front wheel. I didn't take my hands off the handlebar. I just went straight face to ground. [00:04:38] Speaker A: Jen was in the front and she came around the turn and saw my brother's bike. And we kind of came to a stop. They were like, oh, where's Paul? And that's when we saw him part way down the. It was a fairly steep embankment. He was part way down, partially wrapped around a tree. I think he actually walked up on his own. [00:04:57] Speaker C: Heather, why are you here? What are you doing here? Who are these people? I don't remember any of this. [00:05:05] Speaker A: He was concerned about his bike. [00:05:07] Speaker C: I was pretty stunned. Heather, why are you here? What are you doing here? Who are these people? [00:05:17] Speaker A: We kind of figured out pretty quickly. He was on about a 35 to 40 second loop. What he was saying pretty much was, heather, why are you here? What are you doing here? And then he like leans and he's like, who the fuck are these people? I was like, oh, Paul, like, you know, we came up to ride the 24 hour bike race. Like, this is. Jen and Carl have been staying at your house. Oh, okay. Did we win the race? Like, no, we didn't win the race. Heather, what are you doing here? And he started over again. Definitely got a concussion at the very least. My friend Jen, she. She's a physiotherapist. And so she kind of started taking over, like, assessing him while I talked to him. And she was concerned that, like, he'd actually injured his back or his neck as well. This is bad. We can't walk out with him. Like. Like, we didn't know what trail we were on. We were just blindly following him. Right. We don't know where we are to call 911. I had a crappy old iPhone at the time, so I didn't have like Gaia or Velp, anything like that. [00:06:11] Speaker C: So they called my friend Ben, who was a paramedic at the time, and. [00:06:15] Speaker A: He figured out, just talking to us, okay, we know, we know we're on this ridge trail. This is what the trail was like down to our right. Below us is the hospital. We can see the river, like, and he figured it out. He ended up trail run into us. He was able to call back with exact coordinates where we were and coordinate it from there. [00:06:31] Speaker C: No, I wasn't far, but I was not a great spot to get to. [00:06:34] Speaker A: They brought a four by, like a four wheeler up. [00:06:38] Speaker C: Yeah, they got me out of there. [00:06:40] Speaker A: And they were almost going to fly him to Vancouver. And then in the end they didn't. Yeah. [00:06:48] Speaker C: So there wasn't too much drama for me anyways. I knocked myself out pretty good. [00:06:54] Speaker A: He doesn't really remember very much what actually happened that day. It's all secondhand information for him. [00:06:58] Speaker C: I broke C2 and C6, but I didn't compromise the spine in any way. So as far as broken necks go, it was really not that bad. So that took me out of action, off the bike for about eight weeks. My name is Paul Burbage. Came to Whitehorse from Canmore in 2005. I came partially because I wanted to build trails here. Yeah, yeah, that had some appeal. The wild. The Wild west aspect. I built trails in Nova Scotia. It's pretty easy to do so there. But then in Canmore, it was virtually impossible to build trails. And the trails in Canmore weren't the kind of trails I wanted to ride generally. So I was looking forward to being able to create the kind of stuff I wanted to ride here. The trails I really like in Whitehorse, downtown, Boogaloo, on this side of the valley, the Riverdale side, and on the other side of the valley. I love goat. Yeah, those are my favorites. I really like the kind of, like, really rough, fast trails. Trails are super important in my life. I spend a lot of time on them, on my bike or otherwise. They're important to me. For me, that's a creative outlet. So the work I do, I'm a land surveyor. From about 2005 to 2010, I was primarily in the field in the bush, doing land claims on Baffin island, that kind of stuff. And particularly I do legal land surveys, which, if you're doing them right, are a really creative exercise. And so when I moved into more office work, that creative piece and that bush piece kind of left. And so trail building filled that in for me. I believe it was 2015. I think I broke my neck at the end of June, and I started building in mid July. [00:08:39] Speaker E: Two days after he broke his neck, he was out there hiking around in the woods, scouting his trail. Does that surprise me about Paul? Not in the slightest. [00:08:46] Speaker A: Oh, it didn't surprise me. I'm sure he didn't tell you, but, like, he competed in a downhill race as well, while he still had his neck brace. And he didn't win it, but he placed in it. [00:08:56] Speaker C: There wasn't really risk to my neck. It looks bad when I'm out there with a collar on, but I knew it was bad. I'd already been looking at the area where rehab ended up being. [00:09:07] Speaker E: Paul's original thought was a better way to get up to downtown Boogaloo, which is you Understandable. Downtown Boogaloo is so radical. [00:09:13] Speaker C: I've been interested in that area for a long time because I knew a lot of people, like, I love downtown Boogaloo, and a lot of people at that time didn't enjoy climbing up woodcutters to get to it, including some people I really like to ride with. And they wouldn't want to ride downtown because they didn't want to do that climb woodcutters. [00:09:29] Speaker A: Is that the one where there's that really steep pitch on it? Yeah, I've ridden that. Oh, I hate climbing. [00:09:33] Speaker B: So the climb to downtown Boogaloo has never been a good one. So if somebody can make the worst part of downtown Boogaloo better, then that's just a lovely sentiment, obviously, because, I mean, it's. It's very flattering to know that he wants. Loves riding the trail and wants to ride it more and wants other people to ride it more. My name is Jesse DeVost, so I was one of the people who built the Boogaloo trails, and downtown Boogaloo was kind of the very top trail that we had made at the end. [00:10:05] Speaker C: I've been hiking around there, and I'd also been looking higher at the mountain. I was kind of trying to think ahead to the next trail after rehab. What could then connect to rehab, which ended up being Narwhal. I think I had an application and I had just received approval When I broken my neck, there was an approval process through the city. I think at that time, I'd already walked the trail with the city trail crew. And I mean, you don't. At that time, you didn't have to pin it down super precisely. You need some, you know, creative freedom to build the thing. But generally they had signed off on, you know, something within this corridor. Now, I had eight weeks where I couldn't do. I couldn't ride my bike, and I wasn't going to be working as much. So I had some time going to go get my rehab. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the first trail I've ever built where I knew the name right from the start. Often, like the day I finished the trail, I still don't know. But that one I knew right from the start. It's a bit of a call back to Scott Kesey and southpaw too, right? Yeah. [00:10:56] Speaker F: I don't know if it's as much a callback as it is him stealing my stick, you know, getting injured, using the time to build a trail and then giving it a name that salutes the injury or the rehabilitation in his case, but I'll take it. I think it shows that avid riders get injured, they want to stay connected to the scene, so they go out and do a bit of digging and work. And Paul's legendary for this. He's probably put more work into these trails than anybody in the last 10 years. [00:11:24] Speaker C: My planning process. As a surveyor, I have access to some pretty cool tools, but, you know, I use a lot of stuff that most people can use, like GeoReference 1 to 50,000 topo maps, Google Earth. I don't find Google Earth useful in terms of topography, but ground cover, you can tell a lot. Are you in spruce or pine? I was really wanting to stay in pine as much as possible. It's a good building. It's just a nice place to be. So I use a lot of that and then a lot of on the ground time for, like, the figuring out the actual route, like the small details of the route, which make a huge difference. The route figuring out, I really like to do myself because I feel like that's the bones of the trail. And I've relinquished control over pieces of trail once or twice in the past, and once or twice it's turned out really well, and a few times it's turned out where I'd ride those sections of the trail. And I'm just like, oh, I didn't want to do that and I don't like it. It's kind of the creative piece that you want. That I want. That's part of what I'm trying to get out of it. So I like to control that piece as much as I can. Typically I just walk around a lot and then at some point I just pull a saw out and I start like kick, I kick a little line in like 30 meters ahead of me. And then I, then I clear the corridor and you know, look around at it, take the side off, straighten the corner out a bit. If it needs to back and forth a lot, I want it. It's amazing how many times I walk back and forth a 30 meter section looking at it and then trying to imagine trail speed too, which you always get parts of it wrong. Most of rehab follows like kind of like a little bit of a height of land or at least a hog's back a little bit. So it's pretty dry, which leads to really easy building. [00:12:59] Speaker E: Yeah, a lot of it was easy. But let me tell you what, there were some, there were some not easy parts and I think I got to build all of those. [00:13:05] Speaker C: And there's not much organics. [00:13:07] Speaker E: And I can remember just like going through the worst organic you've ever gone through. And I was knee deep in it and just hacking away and I was like, Paul, why did you send me way over here? What the hell is going on? Why am I not up there? He was just laughing at me the whole time. [00:13:26] Speaker C: So, yeah, for sure. [00:13:30] Speaker E: That'S right before you get up onto that ridge. And then all of a sudden it's like, you know, you're like out of the can. I swear on this. Okay, so you get. So it's right before you get up onto that ridge, you get out of this shit and all of a sudden you're on this nice open ridge again. [00:13:44] Speaker C: And it's like, yeah, I let some. [00:13:45] Speaker E: Curse words fly in that section of the trail. [00:13:48] Speaker C: It wasn't that bad to build in terms of the ground. Having just finished Starbucks Revenge, we learned a big lesson about choosing suitable ground. So I was really careful to stay in pine forest. There was one spot, it kind of got forced through a wet area. And then in two years later, a spring came up and ended up having to put a bridge in there. There it was dry for the first two years of the trail. That was the only really tough spot. And then right after that wet spot, there's a spot you have to gain an Old Esker, that was a bit tricky. But mostly it's pretty decent building through there. If you go much further east, it gets wetter and more difficult. I guess the thing that I was most excited to build, and I know one or two people who's had pretty significant crashes there, there's like this ephemeral draw that comes through, and then if you're coming down, you make a hard left and then a hard right. And then you go through this ephemeral draw. And if you go really, really fast, you can like kind of skip over top of it, jump it. I got some feedback when it was first completed. Two friends of mine crashed there. I don't know what they were doing, but they didn't ride it well and they crashed it. And some feedback on how that could be changed. I said, oh, yeah, well, you could just ride it correctly. That's another option. Most of the time I would build by myself because I would be up there during work hours a lot, right? Because I wasn't working full time or I wasn't working at all for a little while. So I would be up there by myself most of the time. I'd usually drive into the Buckway and then just ride up from there. I leave my chainsaw on site. I also had a brand new bike and it arrived right after I broke my neck. It was questionable, but I could ride up to build trail and then ride back on the new bike with my stupid collar on. But it was. It was a form of riding bikes, at least. My safety meetings were probably shorter than they should have been. Although I would do most of the chainsaw work and stuff, I would always do by myself. I wouldn't be swinging a saw around when other people are out there. [00:15:30] Speaker F: Paul was actually the one who called me and encouraged me to take on the role of trail director, with CNBC succeeding him in that role. And he taught me a lot in that transition period about coordinating trail activities with groups of volunteers. But clearly, safety protocols was not one of the things he taught me. He's building a trail by himself with a chainsaw. Reckless. Hope you had a cell phone at least. [00:15:54] Speaker C: I'm sure I had a cell phone. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And my neck breaks. When I was looking for some help, I had a small group of people that I built with in the past or who had expressed a lot of interest. Anthony DiLorenzo, probably Anthony, who's probably the person that came in and helped the most. I would say, yeah, well, definitely Anthony. We built Starbucks together along with another. [00:16:18] Speaker E: Person, Paul and I Have built trails together. But rehab was Paul's trail. Paul laid it out. He did the whole design. And the way Paul laid out the trail was like, just make it the right line right from the start. [00:16:32] Speaker C: Right. [00:16:32] Speaker E: Like, I don't know. We always. You always tend to end up building the path of least resistance. And then you go back and realize it's wrong and you fix it. This trail, I think Paul had the vision right from the start, and he just knew where it had to go. And if you had to deal with some shit to get there, then that's what you did. I spent a fair bit of time up there. Like, Paul spent hours and hours and hours up there. Like, you know, I was just out there moving dirt and pulling trees. [00:16:56] Speaker C: Yeah, I know an anecdote that really stands out in Tony's mind is we'd. [00:17:00] Speaker E: Cut a bunch of trees off at like, you know, four foot height so you could pull them out of the ground properly. [00:17:04] Speaker C: I was trying to rip a stump out of the ground. It was a pretty manual process. And we just call. Anything that's really terrible to remove just gets called a nug. Yeah, there's a nug. It's not a good thing. It sounds like it's a good thing. It's not a good thing. Generally it's good when it's out. [00:17:18] Speaker E: And I looked over and Paul was reefing so hard on one of these trees that he actually popped his neck brace open. [00:17:27] Speaker C: That scared the crap out of Tony. [00:17:29] Speaker E: Then he goes like, oh, geez, I probably shouldn't have done that. And I'm like, well, yeah, you got a broken neck, man. Like, you probably should not have done that. So I think that just kind of encapsulates, you know, who Paul is. Nothing really slows him down too much. [00:17:44] Speaker C: The build took six weeks, I'm pretty sure, which is fast. If I hadn't been injured, I probably would have built that trail over two years, or at least the whole summer. The time on the trail, I would say, personally, in the woods, I had like three or 400 hours maybe. There are probably at least 200 volunteer hours on it as well. Maybe more. No, no, no child labor. No. Towards the end, when I was getting panicky on time and I knew, I was like, once I hit my eight weeks, I wanted to just ride my bike. I remember the dirt girls came out and they did. It helped a lot in one night. It's amazing to see the power of multiplication. You go out there for one day, one night, and you build like 40 meters of trail by yourself and you have, you know, 30 people show up. A lot gets done. [00:18:32] Speaker E: So when the trail was complete and Paul was allowed to take it off, Paul installed his neck brace on a tree, which I thought was a super cool idea, and really kind of tied the trail together. It also proved to be delicious to the local wildlife. [00:18:47] Speaker C: The squirrels have eaten off anything that had salt on it already. They took care of that in the first, like, six months. I don't think that's my, like, official neck brace. I think that's the one they slap on you when they put you on the gurney and then they put something more substantial on you when you're actually in the hospital. So that's. That's the one that I wore for just like a few hours. [00:19:03] Speaker E: So Paul's a surveyor, and one of his old surveyor tricks is when you. [00:19:08] Speaker C: Survey on land claims, you would create these things called bearing trees. And so you would face a tree with a chainsaw and then you would scribe in the distance to the survey post. And so I faced the tree at the top of rehab with my chainsaw, then I carved rehab into it. And then, you know, then a bunch of SAP comes over and protects it. It's really. It's really cool and it'll be there forever. [00:19:25] Speaker E: We did that on Kid Vicious and Starbucks as well. So that's kind of one of Paul's signature moves. So, yeah, right at the top of downtown Boogaloo there, you can see that tree that it's been marked with rehab. [00:19:36] Speaker C: There wasn't a lot of fair and fair when open. I mean, I think we did some sort of, like, I did some sort of public announcement on like, Facebook. And there, I know there are people all over it. Even while it was getting built, you could see that people were riding it. They'd ride up and see how far it was. It was pretty, pretty well known that it was going in. I was also kind of done with being up there for a while, so I wasn't like around to like, do a kickoff or anything like that. I think as soon as the trail was done, I went on a packraft trip. [00:20:01] Speaker E: Paul and I did the Dawnjack route, which is known to be a fairly rugged backcountry route. And he hauled like a 50 pound pack over these rugged mountain passes in a neck brace. [00:20:10] Speaker C: I talked to my doctor before I went about it. He said, yeah, you'll be fine, but if you see anyone out there, maybe don't tell them I'm your doctor. [00:20:19] Speaker E: I can still remember to this very day we're in the middle of this glacial river. So he'd want to see where I was, and he couldn't look around. So every time he had to look around, he had to spin his entire boat to look behind him. I don't know what to say. That's who Paul burbage is in a nutshell. [00:20:36] Speaker A: That's his personality. Right. He's not reckless. He knows what he can and can't get away with, and he obviously has that deep drive to do things at a high level. It's always interesting riding a trail that someone, you know, has built and see how they've used the natural feature features. It's interesting as well, thinking about the fact that he built that while he was recovering from, you know, two broken discs in his neck. [00:20:57] Speaker C: It's not the type of trail I really want to ride. It's a trail I ride to get to something, you know, pretty mellow. It's not that. Yeah, I really wanted rehab to ride well in both directions. It's definitely got more flow going down. The gravity helps with flow, of course, but I think it gets used a lot more going up. Most people are going to go up there to ride down downtown Bugaloo. It's such a good trail. It's a bit tricky, too, because you think you're climbing the whole time, but really, the first half of it is pretty much flat, and then it kicks up at the end. Profile of it is not what I thought as I was building it. Yeah, Yeah. I was riding up towards it, and I ran into a guy who I only quasi knew, and we were just chatting for a minute, said, oh, where are you heading? And he said, oh, I'm gonna go up woodcutters and go down downtown. I was like, oh, yeah, me too. I'm gonna go up, head up rehab. He goes, oh, yeah, I hate that trail. I was like, oh, okay, cool. I built it. You know, that's fine. Everyone has their opinion. Geez, Mark, would I do it again? I think that's. That's an interesting question. Yeah, I'm not sure if I would build that trail again, actually. I've got a lot more satisfaction out of building the trails that are more what I want to ride, Although the access that. That allowed narwhal to be built. So in that way, I'm, like, really happy to have it there. And, you know, actually that I'm glad I built it at that time in my life. That was kind of like right when I was, like, not going to be out of the yukon as much. I spent A lot of time out of the Yukon. I kind of wanted to contribute to the community and be involved. And so that's a. That was a good way to do it because my other trails are a little more selfish, probably. But this is like not really a trail. This is a trail that basically anyone can ride in and enjoy, I think. So riding a trail that you've built is. It's a much different experience than riding something someone else built. There's a way tighter connection. I just. I mean, up or down that trail because I spent so much time and I know it so well, I just. It's really enjoyable for me. Much more enjoyable than a comparable trail that I know is as good. You know, just because I know it so well. Yes, it's a blast to ride and it's just fun to be out there. I up there in the winter on skis or snowshoes a lot too. So glad to have built it. [00:23:09] Speaker D: Every trail tells a story is made in Yukon. The theme music is Blue ska by Kevin McLeod. Additional music and sound effects from Blue Dot sessions and free sound. You can find detailed [email protected] a big shout out to everyone who contributed to this oral history. Thanks for listening. [00:23:45] Speaker C: My first memory was waking up on the trail. Although I had. I had. I had rolled down off the embankment and my sister had gone by. But at some point they thought it was weird that they hadn't caught me. So they came back and they found me. [00:23:57] Speaker D: Okay. He remembered it as you guys rode past him and then you thought, oh, we should have caught up to him by now, and then turned around. [00:24:05] Speaker A: Absolutely not. [00:24:06] Speaker D: No. [00:24:06] Speaker C: But my sunglasses were broken in the middle of the trail. They didn't know they were mine. [00:24:09] Speaker D: Do you remember a pair of sunglasses. [00:24:11] Speaker A: In the middle of the trail? No. [00:24:13] Speaker D: No. [00:24:14] Speaker A: It is amazing how our memories sometimes play tricks on us, right? And he, for the longest time, didn't remember anything from 24 hours before till like 48 hours afterwards, didn't remember a thing. So obviously his brain has slowly pieced it back together a little bit. [00:24:29] Speaker D: Thank you so much. [00:24:30] Speaker A: Yeah, no worries. [00:24:32] Speaker C: Awesome trip down memory lane.