Author: The Hippo Press

Rose Mountain Rumble ride benefits land conservation

Chirs Wells is the President and Executive Director of the Piscataquog Land Conservancy (PLC). The PLC is a private nonprofit land conservation organization that works to conserve the natural resources and scenic beauty of the Piscataquog, Souhegan and Nashua River valleys of southern New Hampshire. The Rose Mountain Rumble that takes place on Saturday, Aug. 24, is their annual “gravel ride” that helps raise funds for the PLC and awareness about land conservation. Registration is full but there is a waitlist. Visit plcnh.org for more information about the organization and rosemountainrumble.com for information about the gravel ride.

What is the Rose Mountain Rumble?

What people that are into it call a quote ‘gravel ride’ or a ‘gravel grinder.’ It’s in between, essentially, road biking and mountain biking. People are mostly riding bicycles that are a tweaked version of a road bike but they’re a little bit beefier, they’ve got a little bit different gearing, a little bit wider tires, and what they’re really made for, yes, you can ride them on pavement for sure, but their sweet spot is to be riding on dirt woods or woods road kind of environment. It’s turned into a real culture and a real scene. One of our organizers, Kris Henry, always likes to stress that this is not a race, this is a ride. The whole point of it is to get people on the back roads, dirt roads of south central New Hampshire, which is the area that we work in, to get out and experience these lightly traveled dirt roads, beautiful scenery, and be with a community of people.

How did the gravel ride get started?

We got started with this ride back in 2014…. It’s our 10th year since the first one but we missed one from Covid, so this is actually officially the ninth annual, so take your pick, it’s either the ninth or the 10th. The first year we had all of 30 people ride in it. We went from 30 to within a couple years we’re at 150 and have been ever since. We capped it intentionally to have it not be too big. Anyway, back in 2014 our organization was working on a land conservation project to conserve basically the whole top of Rose Mountain. It’s sort of a 2,000-footish small mountain in Lyndeborough and we had this opportunity to acquire the property and had to raise a decent amount of money to do it. At the time, somebody who was a longtime friend of the organization said, ‘Here’s an idea, maybe you could do a bike thing or something, you should talk to these people I know in Lyndeborough.’ Those people turned out to be a guy named Kris Henry who’s basically a custom bike builder … and then a couple, Doug Powers and his wife, Doria Harris, they are both avid cyclists…. We literally got together at Kris Henry’s bike building shop, his backyard of his house in Lyndeborough, and pretty quickly came up with the idea of doing a gravel ride in the area and whatever money we could spin off of it would benefit this land conservation area.

Can you expand on what the PLC does?

The PLC is a private, nonprofit land conservation organization; some people will shorten that to being ‘a land trust.’ We are the local land trust, basically, for greater Manchester, greater Nashua, 26 towns altogether. Just about all of them are in Hillsborough County; we have a couple that are in Merrimack. It’s a really diverse area. We’ve been around since 1970. As of today we hold land for conservation easements on … about 9,600 acres. Basically, what we do, we work on a purely voluntary basis with land owners that are interested in conserving their property or looking to sell their property to whoever but we know it’s of conservation value. Some of the lands and easements are straight up donations, some of them we’re paying full market value based on appraisal, and honestly sort of everything in between. The whole point of it is to conserve the property in an undeveloped state in perpetuity, i.e. forever. Once the land is protected, whether it’s through a conservation easement, which is essentially you’re taking the development rights off of a property but it remains in private or town ownership, or something that we own, either way we are then responsible forevermore to be monitoring that property at least annually to make sure that the boundaries are being respected, nothing bad is going on, and that the natural resource values are being protected on an ongoing basis. On some of the properties we own we have trail systems that we are maintaining and in some cases adding to. We’re trying to make some of our properties, where it’s appropriate, to be local recreational areas for people…. All of our lands are open to the public, that is lands we own outright. All of them are open to some level of recreation. Most of them are open to hunting and fishing to people that are into it. We try to have them open to as many activities as is reasonable and safe.

What’s the best way for someone to support PLC’s mission?

It’s kind of the classic answer from a nonprofit organization. One obvious and good way, and we definitely always need people to help us out, is to be a member. Make a contribution, be a member in the organization, support us financially. And/or, it doesn’t have to be one or the other, volunteer. We definitely need volunteers, especially for our property monitoring. We’ve got 80-plus people in any given year that are volunteer land monitors and they are often the people who are out there annually being our eyes and ears on the ground to check on these properties as we go along.

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Rose Mountain Rumble. Photo by Gabriella Nissen.