MegaVolt 2025 Recap

What makes a tradition? How many times do you have to repeat something before it becomes firmly embedded as a thing that you always do? Three times could just be a coincidence. Four times may be a quirky repetition. But five times? Five times takes premeditation. Five times is a habit. As far as I can tell, MegaVolt is now an embedded tradition for NSMB as we’ve now been 5 times in a row! For a group that struggles to meet up for beers once per year, this is impressive.

The problem with traditions is finding something new to say about them. I mean, they’re traditions! They’re supposed to be the same! You don’t keep repeating the same thing over and over and expect different results.

But we can analyze how it got to this point. What is it about this event that caused Cam to dip his toe in for 2021, Deniz to return in 2022, bring Karin back in 2023, and then with Trevor and Cam in 2024? Were they brainwashed? I figured I’d better tag along this year to find out. Here are some observations on what I discovered.

The Trails

A mountain bike event isn’t really anything without trails, so we’ll start here. Over 3 days we covered the majority of the trails in the Three Blind Mice system above Naramata. It had been years and years since I last rode here (astride a hardtail with 4 inches of travel up front) and there was obviously some sort of deep psychological trauma that kept me from returning. These trails are heinous! We think the North Shore is tough on bikes but if I was looking to test the durability of a bicycle Naramata feels like it would be a better choice. We absolutely pummeled our bikes from the moment we hit dirt. Cam handed me a decently working e-bike to start the weekend and I felt a little bit guilty about the steaming pile of bolts that I handed him back. The climbs are relentless and the descents go on forever. Every trail is thick with pointy rocks and you’re constantly one misjudgment away from total ruin. It’s terrible terrain for a skinny tired hardtail and the perfect terrain for a full power e-bike with strong wheels, heavy tires and gobs of travel.

Once we tallied our mileage, we’d ridden something like 80km worth of trails, climbed several thousand meters and descended a few more than that. There was hardly a corner of the system that we left uncovered and with each moment our confidence and fatigue grew in tandem. Though dry, traction was abundant and it became second nature to stuff our bikes into corners, skip over rock fields and inch up and down slabs. Highlights for me were Bronco, which challenged your ability to ride both fast and technically, Jose, which tested your ability to feather your brakes as you surfed your way down loose dirt and rocks, and finally, the swoopy corners of trails like Black Bear, Dead Horse and Three Witches. I’d certainly go back to ride these trails again, but I’d be careful about my bicycle selection.

The Bikes

You also can’t have an e-bike event without an e-bike, and you would be wise to not show up to MegaVolt without at least 160+mm of travel, full DH rubber and inserts. Cam lent me his long term Norco Range test bike and it was perfect for this terrain. I struggled a bit to get enough support in the rear end (35% sag at 255 psi! I hit bottom numerous times) but the flipside to that was a bike that ate the terrain. I enjoyed the fabulous controllable power of the Maven brakes, and didn’t quite enjoy the slightly glitchy shifting Transmission drivetrain. Cam’s strict adherence to inserts also meant that my tires lasted the whole weekend with nary a peep. I did stupid, stupid things and it bailed me out with no problems. There aren’t a lot of huge moves within the Three Blind Mice system (that we encountered) but there are a few that cause you to pause and think for a moment. The bicycle almost required me to hit these moves, lest I feel I had let it down in some way.

Other attendees were astride a wide variety of bikes, but full power and long travel ruled the day. I felt like I saw dozens of Orbea Wilds, more than a few Rocky Mountain Elements, and a smattering of Norco Ranges. Mechanical chaos was prevalent, and within our group I blew up a chain during the enduro, Trevor toasted a derailleur thirty minutes into our shakedown ride, and Pete annihilated a rear tire. People hunkering trailside fixing chains and patching flats was common, and I left Naramata convinced that drivetrains are the weak point for e-bikes.

While durability was important, so was the ability to climb. Over the course of the weekend you’d often find yourself in a long chain of riders, hammering up a climb faster than you’ve ever climbed anything before. If you slipped a pedal or missed a move, you’d cause a cascading series of fuck ups behind you. Suspension travel was almost as important on the climbs as the descents, so you could keep spinning through the chunky and technical moves.

The People

As I scrolled through the previous articles on the MegaVolt, I was struck by how many of the same faces kept appearing. I had a beer with that guy! I saw that guy pile himself into a tree! Beyond the NSMBers there seems to be many other people that keep coming back to MegaVolt.

And why not? It was all of the fun and camaraderie of a post race hang without all of the pressure and attitude getting in the way. Sure, there were “races”, but nobody seemed to be taking them overly seriously. It really was just a nice way to create some structure to the weekend.

Attendees spanned the gamut, from middle aged white men all the way up to senior aged white men (I jest…but e-biking does seem to be a bit more male dominant than regular bikes) and you were just as likely to find yourself sharing a beer or a section of trail with a former pro as a couple enjoying their retirement (this is total speculation…but they at least seemed to be enjoying the weekend) or a crazy Italian man who owned 10 cats and rode an Amflow.

If you paused to look around, you couldn’t swing a charging cable without hitting a BC mountain biker of note. On a personal level, I felt like it was the who’s who of people that I lost to at BC Cup DH races 25 years ago. We were a few selections away from an impromptu reunion of the cast of Kranked 4. Brett Tippie, Barb Haley, Thomas Vanderham, Wade Simmons, Richie Schley and Johnny Smoke (listed in the credits as tour manager) all seemed to pop up when you least expected them on the trails. If only Geoff Gulevich had decided to skip school to go filming way back in 2001, we really could have had something special to celebrate. If freeriders aren’t your jam, then Elladee Brown and Andreas Hestler may have been willing to entertain you with tales of World Cups gone by. Rumour has it that Gracey Hemstreet and Jackson Goldstone are already booked for MegaVolt 2046.

As someone not known for his outward displays of stoke and excitement, even I managed to get caught up in things a few times. Trailside fist bump? Okay. Whoops of entertainment and encouragement? I mean, probably not, but you do you! Loud patterned shirts and kooky hats? Not on your life, good sir. Still, all around were people who just seemed happy to be riding bikes, sharing stories of fun things that happened, and speculating on the fun things to come. It’s hard not to get swept up when that’s the general vibe.

The Events

MegaVolt has just enough order to keep things moving along, and just enough freedom to keep things interesting. It started Friday with the shakedown ride. This was supposed to get the juices flowing and allow people to get acquainted with the trails. So, of course, we decided to make more of it. Johnny Smoke informed us that there were a couple of trails we really needed to check out, so we shimmy’d where we were supposed to shake, and climbed to the top of the mountain. 30+ km and 1200m of climbing later we emerged from the trails as shells of ourselves. How did I do this? What was wrong with me? One small bottle of water and no chamois wound up being a horrible mistake. I not infrequently find myself in positions where I’m unable to speak properly while attending NSMB events, and this followed the pattern. Oh, there was also a technical hill climb challenge but I was too out of it at this point to pay much attention to what was happening there.

The next day began with the eFondo, a sort of XC race by a different name. I mean, it started that way for everybody else, but we decided that it might kill us and our bikes if we didn’t start to pace ourselves. We slept in, had a giant breakfast, guzzled water and made sure our bikes were charged in anticipation of the scavenger hunt.

Cam and Pete had been talking about the 2024 scavenger hunt for a full year (sorry, “Adventure Ride Challenge”). They were like small children, building up the hype of seeing Santa Claus at the mall. Were we going to find a magical man granting wishes and presents? Or a guy in a cheap red suit who stank of cheap whiskey? Amazingly, things lived up to the hype.

The premise of the, ahem, Adventure Ride Challenge, is to give you several points to hit on a map, and you need to figure out the best way to hit them all. We had our host and secret weapon, Craig the fancy Lawyer (the nickname I just christened him with) to lead us quickly and efficiently through the system. We had our core group of around 10 people, and we picked up and cast off stragglers and hangers on throughout the day. Having a low stakes goal to reach was just the sort of thing we needed to create a remarkable amount of fun. Once again, this proved to be the highlight of the weekend.

The next morning was the eEnduro, and the closest thing I got to feeling the pressure to actually race. This was a large climb followed by 3 timed stages of not exactly downhill. The first stage was a 2.6km legburner, through pretty mellow terrain but with lots of surprising corners. The second stage was a 1.9km legburner, with seemingly as much climbing as descending. My chain snapped right at the bottom of the last major climb, so I had a really fun hike-a-bike out. Cam saved the day with a quick link.

The third stage was a 3.9km legburner, and the most fun stage in my opinion. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that I’d also broken part of the guide around the idler pulley, so my chain kept derailing and jamming, which caused me to stop several times throughout the stage. I wound up coasting most of it, but the trails were such that this was still a lot of fun.

Conclusions

My investigation of MegaVolt didn’t turn up anything new or insightful. Fun was had. Bikes were ridden. Trails were conquered. People were met.

Would I go back again? Undoubtedly. Which feels like as good a time as any to mention that the MegaVolt/BC Bike Race crew is currently in the process of redesigning their whole thing. What will emerge for next year? We’ll see, but I imagine somebody from NSMB will be there to explain in great detail how it all went down.