The Roanoke Valley is hosting the 2026 USA Cycling Endurance Mountain Bike National Championships this week.
The event is yet another feather in the cap for the region's cycling community. And for local mountain bikers, it’s just the latest summit in a decades-long uphill grind for respectability.
Kyle Inman's road to mountain biking began with the dirt bike craze of the 1970s. He moved to Roanoke in 1983 and opened a skateboard shop, and when mountain bikes started to emerge, he was primed and ready. But didn't know where to ride.
"When I bought the first bike, I said, ''Well, where do you ride 'em?" Inman says. "They were selling like hotcakes, [but] nobody knew where to go."
At the time, Carvins Cove Natural Reserve didn't allow mountain biking. That didn't stop Inman and others, who painstakingly mapped out trails left by loggers and the Civilian Conservation Core.
"There was no awareness of what was up on Brushy Mountain, the CCC trails," Inman says. "We just by virtue of exploration discovered that. You know, met a guy here or there that said yeah I know something over here, I remember somebody talking about someone over there. Got the USGS topos [U.S. Geological Service topographical maps]. Through that we discovered an old dotted line. I said, 'I wonder if that's a trail.' Well it turned out, it became Hi Dee Hoe."
Inman organized bike races around the region. In 1997, Inman pitched an idea to the city of Roanoke: Host a sanctioned American Mountain Bike Championship event out at Carvins Cove. The city balked. But the resulting publicity made local riders aware of the trails at Carvins Cove.
"Suddenly it revealed to a lot of people you could mountain bike at the cove," Inman says. "They didn't realize there was this stuff out there. And so that's when it really started taking off in terms of the ridership."
Wesley Best was one of the two mountain bikers appointed to a committee to study whether to open up Carvins Cove to mountain bikes.
"There were seven of us, and at the outset, the other five people were 100% against this," Best says. "They thought it was a terrible idea, like, 'Why would we do this? It's our water supply.'"
But Best and fellow biker/committee member Ian Webb kept working at it.
"Through lots of meetings and lots of talks, we were really able to start turning these people in our favor," Best says.
Then came a pivotal field trip.
"Basically, it was once we went to Carvins Cove and they saw what was there," Best says. "Because nobody understood what it was. They didn't know there were all these existing trails and fire roads and all of this stuff. Once that happened, the tide turned. And, so, all of a sudden it went from being five out of seven against this concept to basically being seven out of seven for it."
The opening of Carvins Cove, along with the development of trails at Explore Park, marked the official sanctioning of mountain biking in the Roanoke Valley. The embrace has only tightened over the ensuing decades. Tourism and economic development officials made it a focal point when marketing the area to visitors and businesses.
"All of a sudden it's not just the mountain bikers who paying attention," Best says. "It is people at higher levels that are starting to pay attention to this as an opportunity for us to tell a story very few places can tell. you can have a technology corridor, you can have all of these other things that everybody loves to play up that they are. But when you have this, that's a quality-of-life issue you can't just create."
Visit Virginia's Blue Ridge, the regional tourism agency, even sponsored a professional women's cycling team. Nicola Cranmer, founder and general manager of the UCI Virginias Blue Ridge TWENTY24 Pro Cycling Team, remembers the discussion.
"Here you have this team that travels all around the country, and if the title sponsorship is Visit Virginia's Blue Ridge, how cool is that that for them to be traveling around as ambassadors for the region, and particularly a high-performance cycling team," Cranmer says.
The group is not competing as a team this week at the Endurance Mountain Bike National Championships, but some of its individual members are.
The races are drawing riders from across the country to experience those trails at Carvins Cove, Explore Park, and Elmwood Park. The event continues through Sunday.
