The Contagious Mountain Bike Club (CMBC) has decided to no longer run the 24 Hours of Light Mountain Bike Festival. The event started in 2000 and celebrated its 18th year this past summer. President of CMBC Sammy Salter first participated in 24 Hours of Light in 2011.

“The event has a long history before I started with the club,” said Salter. “It was a very grassroots way to celebrate the solstice. So basically the idea behind the event is a 24-hour lap style race and you do as many laps as you can between noon on Saturday to noon on Sunday. The thing that made the Whitehorse race unique was that the only rule was you were not allowed to use lights.”

Salter says when she first started doing the 24 Hours of Light it had a big party atmosphere where some people would race and some people would just do a lap or two, but over the past few years it became more family oriented.

“We moved locations, it was always at Mt. Mac, then a few years ago we moved over to Grey Mountain and used the facilities of Biathlon Yukon,” said Salter. “It was a lot better for that festival feel because there were places for people to camp and have that community feel. It became more family oriented, and we introduced events and rides for the kids.”

Although CMBC is no longer hosting the 24 Hours of Light they do have another festival planned for the summer.

Unable to go into to much depth about the new event because the club is still waiting to hash out some details, Salters believes this is a positive change for the club.

“I really want to emphasize that this is a positive change,” said Salter. “We are all really sad that we are not doing 24 Hours of Light, it has a long legacy and people have a lot of positive memories of the festival.”

The new festival being organized by CMBC is, according to Salter, going to more accurately reflect the current trends in mountain biking.

“The mountain bike scene in Whitehorse is changing,” said Salter. “That style of cross-country lap race seems to be less popular. There is a whole other burgeoning community of downhill and enduro style riding that we haven’t explored a lot.”

Enduro is a race style where you have to bike up to the top but are only timed on the descents. You also do not get to pre-ride the trails before you race them. The club is looking at how to incorporate new styles of racing into a weekend festival.

“24 Hours of Light was a lot about community building,” said Salter. “We want to refresh and reignite that feeling of building a mountain bike community. We want to get excited about stuff. To kind of put it simply it’s about refreshing and trying new stuff, that is from a volunteer and a rider perspective.”

The new festival will hold true to some of the values of the 24 Hours of Light. It is a new celebration of cycling, looking to reinvigorate the cycling community.

“We are still going to have family friendly components and camping,” said Salter. “We want to switch things up a little bit with food trucks, music and skills clinics truly just like a festival and less like a race with camping.

“There will still be racing components, but components for others too. We want to try new trails because the trails have gotten a lot of wear and tear so it’s a good idea to get the event off of Grey Mountain. There is a lot of potential and a lot of excitement from the volunteer group.”

Salter says the people she has spoken to in person are on board with the vision for a new festival and that the only push-back she has seen, for the most part, has been people from out of town on Facebook.

“The board has gone through a lot of change over the past few years, so it feels like a good time to change our signature event,” said Salter. “So we are going to see how the mountain bike community responds to that. I think it is going to be a fun event, but nothing says we can’t go back to 24 Hours of Light.”

With details still waiting to be finalized the when and the where of the new festival have not been announced. The new festival also does not have a new name and the CMBC is looking to the community to submit names to them, to be decided at their next annual general meeting on Nov. 24.