Portrait of a Multi-Faceted Bike Patrol: HoliMont
Bike patrols come in many different forms. Some, for example, serve cross-country mountain bike trails. Others provide medical support for races and festivals; some support lift-served bike parks. The HoliMont Bike Patrol in Ellicottville, NY, which just concluded its second season as a registered NSP bike patrol, works in all three ways.
Our bike patrol supports the HoliMont Bike Park and all other summer events. Although we’ve only had two seasons as a registered patrol, we’ve been actively supporting HoliMont for much longer. We started by providing medical/safety support for members who were riding the property’s cross-country mountain bike trails. Next, we found ourselves supporting off-road bike races. Then, HoliMont started offering lift access for mountain biking four years ago.
With the support of HoliMont, we registered as an NSP bike patrol and named two of our winter patrollers as primary members. I serve as Patrol Director and Mike Bailey, also from HoliMont, is our second primary member. In addition, we now have many darn good patrollers from all over WNY registered as secondary. Some are from HoliMont, but others are from nearby WNY winter patrols such as Holiday Valley, Kissing Bridge, Buffalo Ski Center, Cockaigne, and Allegheny Nordic.
We now have a dedicated group of over 20 bike patrollers who respond to incidents, provide medical support, and transport as necessary. We developed many new protocols, including guidelines for how to use our “Medlite” quad runner, fully equipped for incident response and transport.
Our average season is about 60 days, starting on Memorial Day weekend and ending after the Ellicottville, NY Fall Fest. Lifts are open and patrol is on-site every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. In addition to recreational riding, the bike park features competitive events including mountain biking and cyclocross races. We also serve many other athletic events such as trail running, uphill challenges, and disc golf. All are staffed by our fully credentialed bike park patrollers.
This past summer, we partnered with our safety committee and hosted a two-day safety event. Ellen Conrad and Doug Levy, our Safety Advisor, organized the weekend and we staffed it with bike patrollers. There was great swag for participants! We ran the event on a weekend that included a mountain bike and a kids-on-bikes day. The timing was perfect. The NSP safety event was quite successful.
Like many bike patrols, our biggest challenge is recruiting, even though our requirements are minimal. In fact, riding a bike is not even required! This is because many of our responses are walk-ins or transported to the patrol medical center by our Medlite quad. And the benefit is that we get bike park access and can even earn winter lift tickets!
If you’re interested in learning more about our patrol, contact me at dhawkes184@gmail.com. If you want to learn more about forming a bike patrol contact Tim Franz, the Eastern Division Bike Program Supervisor.