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OJAI MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2022
when dillon osleger jams the printer at the local copy-and-ship, the weather outside is cool and overcast. it’s ideal mountain-biking weather, really, so i’m surprised to find the professional cyclist hunched over a paper tray instead of his handlebars. “I convinced a library to send me a copy of an original 1968 Los Padres forest map from their basement archives,” he laughs, smoothing his hand over the half-finished print. “It was just way too big of a file.” If most of us perceive our worlds through shapes and colors, Osleger sees in layers and lines. The 27-year-old Ojai local is the executive director of SAGE Trail Alliance, a nonprofit that designs and restores trails throughout Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Ojai. The organization stewards over 250 miles of trail alongside land management partners and has invested more than $500,000 in the region’s public lands,
taking my bike out on the trails though, and I started making friends with all the old guys who would be out hiking and biking, and they invited me to a trail building volunteer day.” While trigonometry didn’t make sense to Osleger on paper, understanding why a trail needs to slope at a particular angle to prevent erosion was easy. Suddenly, he was memorizing soil composition and native species with the ease and fervor some kids master videogames with, which eventually led to a master’s degree in earth science. It was around the same time he was collecting diplomas that Osleger realized he was fast on a mountain bike — we’re talking podium and champagne-shower fast — and so did his sponsors. He’d made it to the highest level of competition with 200 of the top riders on the Enduro World Series circuit when something started to not sit right with him and, ironically, it all came back to trigonometry.
How a geologist and pro mountain biker is creating more sustainable Ojai trails.
“When I started biking, there used to be
Shovels and with construction of 65 miles of new trail planned by 2030. It’s a job that feels almost poetically suited for the geologist, professional mountain biker and budding historian — because, as it turns out, you need a lot more than a shovel to build a trail. Like the sinewy lines snaking across his half-printed map, Osleger’s story zigs and zags. His great-grandfather was the head of the Alpine Club in Switzerland. His parents are geologists, and he spent his childhood getting acquainted with the dirt next to them as they conducted their field work. But despite his academic pedigree, school didn’t click for Osleger, and he found himself skipping class to spend time in the forests around his hometown in Truckee, California. “I had a lot of anxiety as a kid and seeing math laid out on a whiteboard didn’t work with my learning style,” he explains. “I liked
this equilateral triangle,” he says. “There was racing at the top of the triangle, then community in one corner, and trail building and environmental advocacy at the other. But as time went on and the sport tried to legitimize itself, the triangle got weighted toward the professional athletes and really left youth and the reasons people join the sport behind. We were flying to the same places again and again, the same 100 people going as fast as they could and braking hard. That’s incredibly damaging to trails. I just didn’t understand where I was going with it and I missed the sense of community and advocacy that I’d had in Truckee.” It took a fire for Osleger to realize what he’d maybe already known about trails. Call it a case of not seeing the forest for the trees, maybe — except in this case, the trees were charred black and the trails were completely missing.
story and photos by JOHNIE GALL
