What do you Outride?

A Coombs participant's first summer on bike trails

Mikey (13) loves being outside. He started skiing with Coombs Outdoors five years ago, and has since spent summers hiking, backpacking, and kayaking along the trails and rivers in the Tetons. 

Last summer, he started mountain biking with Jackson Hole Youth Mountain Biking, and immediately took to the challenge and fast pace of the sport. “I love the adrenaline rush from racing downhill on skis, or going down the rapids in a kayak,” he says. Mountain biking added another level of excitement to spending time outside. 

“There’s all this talk about what it means to be a local. Some say you have to live here your whole life, but I see it as all the things you do here. Coombs has turned me on to all these outdoor sports, and now when I talk to people about what I like to do it makes me feel like a real local. That’s what Jackson is all about”

Mikey rode with the mountain bike team twice a week through the summer, meeting new friends and learning different skills and techniques. “I’d tried it a couple times before and thought it was really cool, but last summer I improved a lot,” he says. “It’s so much fun, but challenging at the same time.” While some aspects of biking were hard or scary, over the summer he went back to the same trails over and over again and eventually felt confident riding harder turns or technical parts of the trail. “Going through those tough parts, like a hard turn on the bike trail, shows me that when I keep trying I can eventually get through challenges.” 

Whether it’s mountain biking, skiing or kayaking, being outside is what Mikey loves the most about growing up in Jackson. “There’s all this talk about what it means to be a local. Some say you have to live here your whole life, but I see it as all the things you do here. Coombs has turned me on to all these outdoor sports, and now when I talk to people about what I like to do it makes me feel like a real local. That’s what Jackson is all about.”

We are over half way towards our goal of raising $10,000, which we have applied for matching grant funds through the Specialized Outride Fund, for a total of $20,000 to fund this program.

Click below to help us meet our goal!