When endurance cyclist Janice Tower founded nonprofit organizations Mighty Bikes and Singletrack Advocates in the early 2000s, she wasn’t planning to revolutionize the mountain bike scene in Anchorage. She simply had a few ideas that she thought worth pursuing. But from an outside perspective, it’s easy to see how deeply Tower’s ideas have shaped and impacted Anchorage’s bike community.
Raised in Anchorage, Tower attended Service High School before leaving the state for college and graduate school. In 1992, during her pursuit of a master’s degree at Portland State University, she got her first mountain bike. As an adult learner, Tower relished in developing a new skill.
“It was such a fun learning curve,” she said. “Every time you’d go out you were constantly improving and honing skills. I just really loved that aspect.”
After moving back to Anchorage and commuting to work by bike, Tower realized she wanted to further develop her mountain bike skills. She attended Dirt Camp, a skills clinic in Moab, where she discovered she was gifted with endurance. It wasn’t long before Tower entered and completed a 24-hour race in Moab. “It was a great feeling of accomplishment,” she said.
Tower continued to train and race, completing long distance rides and further developing her mountain bike skills. A few years later, in 2000, she started a summer program to help youth Alyeska ski club racers train through the summer months on mountain bikes. It wasn’t long before the program gained momentum and opened to the general public. “I started getting more and more inquiries from people in the community, and I realized, wow — there’s a real need to give kids something to do in the summertime,” Tower said.
Mighty Bikes is “still going strong,” said Tower, and continues to serve kids from ages eight to fourteen. Participants are grouped according to age and ability and paired with volunteer coaches. The program takes place in the evenings, with group sizes averaging around ten participants. Some former Mighty Bike participants have gone on to become coaches, and “thousands of kids have gone through the program,” Tower said. The program is capped at 300 participants per year.
After the first few years of running Mighty Bikes, Tower recognized the need for more challenging trails for participants. At the time, mountain bikers were using existing hiking trails, which also created some user conflicts between bikers and hikers. “It was starting to become contentious, in terms of how those trails should be maintained,” Tower said. So in 2004, she founded Singletrack Advocates (STA), a nonprofit designed to work with other trail users and land managers to maintain and create trails in Anchorage.
In 2005, STA built their first trail, Brown Bear. “We laid out and built brown bear by hand in one summer. “It took the whole summer,” said Tower. The group quickly realized that building trails by hand would be far too slow of a process, and in 2008 began to build a network of trails at Hillside with the assistance of machines.
“Everybody calls those the ‘old trails,’” said Tower. “But when we did that project it was literally groundbreaking. These were really cool trails with switchbacks and rollers.”
In the years that followed, STA would build two trail systems at Kincaid, expand the Hillside trail system, build Hemlock Burn trail in Chugach State Park and complete a new system of trails near Service High. In all, the organization has created over 35 miles of dedicated mountain bike trails in the Anchorage area.
While Tower is no longer president of STA, she sits on the board and remains heavily involved with advocacy for mountain bikers around Anchorage. In her personal time, she continues to pursue impressive feats on her bike. This year, she completed the Iditarod Trail Invitational, riding nearly 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome. Tower had previously completed the route to McGrath. She said it always seemed impossible to complete the entire trail, especially for someone her age. “But you never know unless you try,” she said.
After rehabbing two total knee replacements, Tower felt she was ready to take on the remaining trail from McGrath to Nome. She raced alongside her brother, the pair enjoying a mix of challenging conditions and cruiser trail sections.
“I think one of the coolest sections was from Kaltag to Unalakleet,” said Tower. “That is just beautiful country. We got up on this high plateau, and the weather was good, so we had great visibility and just incredible vistas. It was just neat to go from the interior of Alaska out to the coast when you could see the ocean for the first time. It was really impressive realizing that we had gotten there on our own power.”
Moving forward for Tower, she hopes that others will become involved in advocating for trails and for Alaska’s State Parks. “I hope I can inspire others to get more involved, because I do want to retire,” she said. “But then, what would I do? I’ll probably think of something else … I have a lot of ideas,” she adds with a laugh.
