Trail Sustainability Institute
Trail Sustainability Institute, or TSI, promotes the coexistence of conservation and recreation.
TSI fosters education, conservation, and a culture of land stewardship in the mountain bike/off-road cycling community. With 35 years of sustainable trail building and maintenance experience, Northwest Trail Alliance (NWTA) originally created TSI as a way to grow the skills and knowledge base of our nearly 5,000 members and trail volunteers.
The current and future areas where multi-use trails exist are also home to plants and animals that make up the rich ecological diversity of the Pacific Northwest. It is our responsibility as recreators to build and maintain our trails to give riders and other trail users a meaningful way to experience nature. It is also our responsibility to build and maintain trails in a way that stewards the land and ecosystem itself, so trails and natural areas carry on for generations.
The TSI curriculum focuses education around building and maintaining our trails within the natural environment using methods that respect habitat and water quality. All ages are engaged in the immersive experience of learning best practices to build and maintain trails and develop the next generation of land stewards.
By training people to build sustainable trails, and by training people to lead crews of trail builders, we are raising the level of our own stewardship, and increasing our capacity to build and maintain quality trails.
TSI Instructors
Trail Sustainability Institute Episode 1
Trail Sustainability Institute Classes
Trail School: Fundamentals
- Safety
- Trail work etiquette
- Tool identification/uses
- Trail vision
- Corridor clearing
- Proper drainage for water quality protection
- Invasive plant vectors and preventing spread
- Basic bench work
Trail school: Crew Leader Training
- Pre-event preparedness
- Safety
- Crew assessment
- Skill building within crew
- Situational awareness
- Time/effort management
- Support your crew
Trail School: restoration lab
- Enhance degraded habitat and biodiversity by teaching proper techniques to remove invasive species in current/future trail corridors
- Mitigate damage by unauthorized trails (or decommission trails)
- Properly construct or reconstruct trail tread to improve local surface water quality within a watershed.
Advanced Trail school
Various advanced classes offer the next stage in sustainably building specific trail features; some of which are bike-optimized. Advanced class topics include:
- Rollers and berms
- Advanced/specialized benching
- Rock work
There are several training classes given per year. Watch the event calendar and/or Contact Nancy Stone for more details.
Sawyer Training
The NWTA partners with the US Forest Service and other agencies and trail organizations to ensure sawyers with NWTA are properly trained and certified to complete the necessary volunteer work safely and effectively. Watch our event calendar for upcoming sawyer training opportunities.
Heavy Machinery Training
NWTA owns a number of pieces of heavy equipment. Effective and safe use of this equipment requires proper training. If you are already an experienced trail builder and want to help out with machine-built trails, contact Daniel Stuart for more information. This training is apprentice-like and requires close to a 40 hour commitment to be productive on the trail building machines.
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