Meet Your Neighbors

Ed Bartunek:
Pedaling Conservation

When Ed Bartunek first started riding his mountain bike through Chicago-area forest preserves, he was simply looking to have some fun. Today he’s become a leader in the mountain biking community, and an active steward of the natural areas where he rides.

Bartunek worked as a network administrator for Procter & Gamble for 25 years and owned a bar in Berwyn, The Harlem Avenue Lounge, for nearly 20 years. The 55-year-old resident of southwest-suburban Stickney, Illinois, took some of his first rides along the Salt Creek Bike Trail and in the Palos Forest Preserves. But he couldn’t devote much time to riding until he retired from Procter & Gamble in 1995. Shortly after that, he decided to sell the bar, in part because of his growing interest in mountain biking.

Bartunek says a group of guys would come in to his bar after rides and talk for hours about their experience on the trails. “I got stuck working Sundays and had to miss the rides,” he says.

After Bartunek sold the bar, he met a group of mountain bikers who invited him to join them to work on the trails, ride, and barbeque. “So I decided to give it a try,” he says, “and they had me hooked. I love being outside on my bike or doing restoration work. I just enjoy being in nature.”

The restoration work Bartunek refers to includes more than just maintaining trails. His trips to the local forest preserves inspired him to learn more about caring for them, so he started attending restoration workdays, often at Theodore Stone Woods. Next he took classes on controlled burning and herbicide use, and he is now a certified master steward.

Bartunek is also currently executive director of the Chicago Area Mountain Bikers (CAMBr) and the Chicagoland representative for the International Mountain Bicycling Association. He works to build good relations between mountain bikers and the Forest Preserve District, restoration groups, hikers, and equestrians, groups that sometimes express different ideas about proper use of the preserves. Bartunek says many people still have an image of mountain bikers as young, wild, and destructive — like those depicted on a Mountain Dew commercial.

But the amicable Bartunek emphasizes the common interest all groups have in caring for and enjoying the region’s natural areas. CAMBr, with 400 paid members and more than 1,200 people on its e-mail list, promotes responsible trail use — reminding riders to stay on trails marked for mountain bikes, to ride only when the trails are dry or frozen, and to be friendly and courteous to other preserve users.

CAMBr also encourages mountain bikers to help out in the local forest preserves. CAMBr workdays, overseen by Bartunek, involve trail maintenance, cleanup, and even habitat restoration, where the bikers remove invasive buckthorn and honeysuckle. The CAMBr workdays focus only on the areas extending ten feet to either side of the trails, but Bartunek also encourages bikers to volunteer in other parts of the preserves. At one workday at Theodore Stone Woods, he says, the volunteer mountain bikers outnumbered the regular restoration volunteers.

Many restoration advocates are wary of mountain bikers riding in local preserves. Renegade mountain bikers have removed or destroyed trail markers and carved new trails through sensitive plant communities, and some trails have caused erosion nightmares (see our profile on Deer Grove). But mountain bikers, Bartunek included, generally prefer narrow, single-track dirt trails to the wider, crushed limestone trails found in some preserves. “The crushed limestone is like a highway,” he says. “On the primitive trails you go slower and really pay attention to the plants and animals.” CAMBr argues that well-designed single-track can have less ecological and aesthetic impact. Keeping well-placed trails well-marked is essential, says Bartunek, since they keep riders away from sensitive areas.

Bartunek takes this pro-biker message to public meetings and nearly everywhere else he goes. He wants officials and other forest preserve users to know that mountain bikers can be good citizens who help to care for the places where they love to ride.

— Stephanie Folk