Trail builders rarely start their day near an outlet. More often, the morning begins at a remote trailhead or in our neck of the woods, a base camp tucked deep into a cold, damp Pacific Northwest forest. When that is the reality, hot water is not a luxury. It is part of the workflow.

This field note looks at a simple question trail crews may be asking. As more crews rely on battery systems and vehicle-based power, does electric camp gear actually make sense in the field?

To answer that, I spent a cold morning brewing coffee off-grid with the Stoke Voltaics Kettle Pot, paired with Off the Grid coffee from Treeline Coffee Roasters (I know, a “rough” morning). What follows is less a traditional gear review and more a trail builder workflow story.

Unsanctioned trail building is rarely about defiance. More often, it is about absence.

Across the Unsanctioned series, Trail Builder Magazine has documented a recurring pattern: riders recognize a gap in their community, and instead of waiting years for process, permission, and paperwork, they quietly pick up tools and start shaping dirt. Not because they reject stewardship, but because something meaningful is missing.

This story comes from a small, resource-based community in western Canada. For years, there were no mountain bike–specific trails, no bike association, and no visible pathway for legal trail development. What followed was not protest, but persistence.

Packable trail tools have quietly become one of the most interesting categories in trail building. As more trail work happens in remote zones, on bikes, or during informal volunteer days, the need for lightweight, mobile tools has grown alongside it.

Each year at Trail Builder Magazine, we publish stories across a wide spectrum of trail building life. Technical how-tos. Product reviews. Profiles of builders. Reflections on stewardship, access, and culture. Pieces that celebrate the work and others that wrestle honestly with its challenges.

But at the end of the year, it is worth pausing to ask a simple question.

What did people actually read?

If you have been following our conversations around trail towns, you already know the tension. Many rural communities have enough trail infrastructure to be proud of, but not enough confidence to say it out loud. They worry about marketing too early. They worry about attracting the wrong kind of attention. They worry about promising more than they can deliver.

For most of mountain biking’s history, trail building lived in a curious space. It was essential to the sport yet rarely treated as its own profession. Its origin story is rooted in rogue trail builders. Riders with tools and imagination carved lines into hillsides long before formal trail systems existed. From those early days through the volunteer era that followed, trail building operated on passion, community, and ingenuity more than official recognition. But something is changing. Mountain biking is expanding at a rate few predicted, and with that expansion, trail building is maturing into a true profession.

I spend a lot of time around trail builders. Sometimes I am taking photos. Sometimes I am tagging along on a dig day. Sometimes I am just listening. And over the years, one thing keeps coming up in those conversations. Builders want people to understand the work. They want the community to see what actually goes into creating a trail or repairing the damage after a storm. They want more people to care.

Over the past few months, I have been learning how to find my pace. Not the pace of putting out fires or scrambling to keep up, but the steady rhythm of building something that is starting to take on a life of its own.

Most trail organizations are doing incredible work, but almost no one sees it. Saturday morning crews shape tread, clear corridor, and fix drainage issues that keep local trails alive through another season. Yet outside the handful of volunteers who show up that day, the story disappears. There are no photos, no short updates, no narrative showing what was accomplished or why it matters. For small volunteer-led groups and nonprofits with limited staff, this is normal. But in a world where visibility equals credibility, staying quiet has real costs. This article explores why social media matters for trail organizations and how even the smallest groups can use simple storytelling to grow volunteers, attract sponsors, and strengthen relationships with land managers.

Trails do far more than connect riders to landscapes. Across the country, they are connecting people to jobs, businesses, and new opportunities. From Arkansas to West Virginia, rural communities are proving that investing in trails pays off—creating both direct and indirect employment that strengthens local economies.