Community Bike Works Clean Mountain Bike Trail at Keck Park

Photo from Community Bike Works

Community Bike Works, a great local nonprofit that uses bicycles and positive mentors to help inner-city kids, cleaned up a new, introductory mountain bike trail at Keck Park yesterday. While there, volunteers received a visit from Mayor Ray O'Connell. I thought he was just a basketball player, but he's a cyclist too, and tells me he used to beat Marty Nothstein regularly at the Velodrome. He put on a clinic with the kids, showing them how to do the bunny hop to jump over logs. He left with an itch that he thought was a tick, but it turned out to be Courtney Robinson.

OK, now that I have your attention with a few lies, let me tell you about this trail. Kim Schaffer, who deserted Northampton County business bigwigs a few years ago to help kids at Community Bike Works, tells me that the trail was actually built last Fall and early this year by students of Community Bike Works, along with the City of Allentown and LV mountain bikers. It's designed to help mountain bike beginners, although the trail can be used by anyone. Kim's students, along with Muhlenberg College undergrads and Lehigh Gap Nature Center volunteers, have logged hundreds of hours there and pulled out many bags of litter and other garbage.

Yesterday, they also removed invasive plants. I believe that is called weeding. They were replaced with native plants. This is called planting. I'd love to see a few paw paws, which was George Washington's favorite desert and grows right here in Pa! You won't see them in a grocery store because they spoil too quickly.

Community Bike Works has an "Earn a Bike" program to give kids that special freedom you feel when two tires spin beneath you. Lebron James put it best: “A bicycle, for me, was the only way to get around the city. If I wanted to meet some of my friends, travel across the city, go to school, play basketball—anything—the bicycle was the way I got around."

If you have a used bike you'd like to donate, call Community Bike Works at (610) 434-1140.