2016 mountain bike ride coming to Carson City

Carson City will host a mountain biking event with up to 2,000 trail riders on a weekend in June of 2016, Joel Dunn, Visitors Bureau director, said Tuesday.

He told a Rotary Club luncheon audience at the Carson Nugget the formal mountain biking announcement would come soon and was prodded during after-talk questioning about the event, but didn’t fully divulge all details. He did say information at EpicRides.com could provide background.

The next Epic Rides event is listed there as this April 24-26 and is called the Whiskey Off-Road event. There are three others, which dovetails with Dunn’s saying the one here would be the fifth for the backers. Dunn said he and the organizers would seal a deal that would cover five years of such summer mountain biking weekends here, noting a memorandum of understanding was to be signed today.

“The pros actually come a week early to get to know the track,” Dunn said. He said tracks covering 15, 40 and 50 miles are probably going to be involved.

The Epic Rides website showed the four events it now has are the Whiskey Off-Road next month, the Tour of the White Mountains and 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo, all three in Arizona, and the Grand Junction Off-Road event in Colorado. The website asks people who visit it if they remember their first bike ride, then explains Epic Ride events in that context and in this way:

“At Epic Rides, we believe that every ride should be just as exciting as the first one. That’s why each of our events is more than just an event. It’s a celebration of the bicycle, the outdoors, and the individuals who make the mountain biking community the coolest group of people on the planet.”

Dunn indicated the event coming to Carson City is a by-product of the bureau he heads rebranding the community for tourism as an outdoor-oriented hub of a superior region for active people interested in such pursuits, as well as the traditional historic and Old West attractions that have been stressed formerly.

He and Kyle Horvath, who handles bureau marketing, said rebranding reliance on social media has helped make that transition and fed into earning Carson City USA Today designation as the best state capital to visit. Horvath said right after that USA Today designation, Google called and Google mapping of the community’s trail system in both the urban and rural areas has been proceeding from that.

Dunn, meanwhile, said his bureau helped attract tourists and up to 700,000 visitors came to the community in 2013 and helped the economic situation with their spending. He said they stay a couple of days or so, stay in hotels and shop or visit restaurants and other spots.

“What that makes up is about 35 percent of taxable sales in Carson City,” he said.