Thomas Jenkins has been building trails around Harrisonburg, Virginia for 25 years. His efforts have helped transform the city into a mecca of hiking and biking, and opened up long-neglected national forest trails.
If you’ve hiked or biked in Virginia’s central Shenandoah Valley, you’ve probably experienced a Thomas Jenkins trail. After co-founding the Shenandoah Valley Bicycle Coalition (SVBC) in 1996—which has since become one of the East Coast’s largest and most active bike-related clubs—the 49-year-old spearheaded trail-making efforts throughout the region.
The results transformed Massanutten Resort’s Western Slope into a hike-and-bike mecca, with about 40 miles (and counting) of pro-grade, multiuse trails.
Partnering with the Forest Service, Jenkins helped secure more than $750,000 in grants and oversaw trail work in now-acclaimed hotspots like Reddish Knob and Braley Pond Day Use Area. Meanwhile, he lobbied local officials to make Harrisonburg more bike-friendly. The efforts helped the city become the state’s first designated International Mountain Biking Association Ride Center in 2011.
“Thomas has developed a kind of calling card,” SVBC executive director Kyle Lawrence told REI’s Co-Op Journal last year. “If you see a hand-built rock sidewalk, bridge, or stairwell winding through a big bunch of boulders, you know it’s his. His build-style defines the area’s trails.”
But becoming a regional trail-guru wasn’t always the plan. Jenkins says, “It just kinda happened.”
Raised a mile from Great Falls National Park in Northern Virginia, he grew up loving the outdoors. Though he rode motocross as a teen, he didn’t discover mountain biking until attending Radford University.
“And it bit hard,” Jenkins says with a laugh. “I went from know-nothing to zealot, like, immediately.”
Back then, the sport had yet to go mainstream. Accordingly, trails tended to be poorly marked and maintained. Land-use was nearly always ill-defined. Sans cellphones or GPS, riders relied on fragmentary descriptions, topographic maps and compasses.
“It was pretty adventurous,” says Jenkins. He often spent more time lost than riding. “If you ventured into somewhere obscure, you’d better be ready to spend the night.”
Approaching graduation, he had an epiphany: “I’d majored in accounting,” he says. “But all I really wanted to do was ride bikes and be outside.” …
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