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BUCKHANNON – Under brilliant blue skies and white, fluffy clouds, dozens of volunteers fanned out across the Upshur County Recreation Park one Saturday in June to do something a year in the making: put kids on brand-new bikes.
The Ride and Shine giveaway day, held June 13 at the recreation park behind Buckhannon-Upshur High School, distributed 20 to 30 new bicycles to Upshur County children — each one paired with a helmet and a bike lock and, for many, fitted to a child who had never owned a bike before.
It was a major event for Ride and Shine: Bikes for Upshur Kids, a nonprofit founded last November by Julia Kastner, a longtime volunteer with the county’s mountain bike trail system.
“This is our first big thing. It’s been eight months in the making,” Kastner said. “Today’s the day that we get to put kids on the bikes. It’s awesome, very exciting. I have never done anything like this before, so it’s scary.”
The idea grew out of Kastner’s years working with kids on bikes, and a gap she noticed along the way.
“I am a bike person. I work with bikes in the trail system here, and I work with kids on bikes, and it slowly became clear to me that these great programs for kids are doing a great job of helping kids get bikes if their parents and their families are already involved, but there might have been a gap there,” Kastner said.
The bikes given away Saturday were not big-box-store models, Kastner said, but bike-shop quality and bought new for each child.
“What we have here are free bikes that are bike-shop quality — better-quality bikes that are brand new, purchased for these children. They’re totally free, and they get a helmet and a bike lock with every bike,” she said.
The day was built around the kids. Children checked in and moved through dedicated stations, where volunteers helped match each one to the right bike, adjusted the seat and showed them how to ride it. Every rider was fitted for a helmet and walked through why it matters and how to wear it.
On the old practice football field, a training course gave kids who had never ridden a place to learn the basics and give their new bikes an introductory spin.
The result was a lot of happy faces. One girl, maybe six years old, stood in front of her own shiny pink mountain bike. Older kids rolled away on Treks from Joey’s Bike Shop, free to go ride with friends in a way some of them could not have afforded before.
Getting bikes that good for free took a network of partners willing to help make it happen.
Joey’s Bike Shop in Elkins “sold us bikes at zero profit to him, and probably some loss of his time and effort,” Kastner said. Norco, a bike company based in British Columbia, came in through a sponsorship deal Kastner arranged with a local representative and “sold us those bikes at below … what bike shops are paying for them.”
The money came from a mix of grants and small donors. Kastner credited the League of American Bicyclists’ Community Sparks Grant, the Rotary Club of Buckhannon-Upshur and Try This West Virginia, along with “a bunch of small individual donors, some of whom are here as volunteers today.”
“I’ve got 20-something volunteers here today, absolutely making this possible,” she said.
Mountain CAP of West Virginia handled applications. The program was open to Upshur County residents in kindergarten through fifth grade whose families were at or below 150% of the poverty level.
The giveaway is rooted in the trail network that drew Kastner to Upshur County in the first place.
“I have been here not quite seven years, and I came through when I was living out of my van, and I stayed here because of this bike trail system, and the group of people I found here,” she said. “That is why I’m a resident and a homeowner and a taxpayer in Upshur County — because of this feature.”
“I am a mountain biker; I care about community. I was a volunteer trail builder who’s gotten to do some professional paid trail building since I got here, so the group of people and the infrastructure and the opportunities that I found here mean the world,” she said.
That volunteer-built trail system — purpose-built singletrack looping around Buckhannon-Upshur High School in the Tennerton recreation park — has grown into a regional draw over the past decade, expanding to hundreds of acres and drawing riders from across the state. In recent years it has hosted the Upshur County Uprising, a stop on the West Virginia Mountain Bike Association’s race series.
The new bikes, Kastner hopes, will keep that momentum going for another generation.
She is careful, though, about what success looks like. It is not about producing racers.
“It’s not necessarily my ambition that these kids become like NICA racers or mountain bikers throughout their lives. That’d be great. I’d love for that to happen,” Kastner said. “But what I really want to do is give every kid who wants a bike the opportunity to have what I think a lot of us think of as a universal experience of being a kid, riding a bike around the neighborhood. If they get some enjoyment and some opportunity to see how much they like it, that’s enough for me, whether they take it far or not.”
Kastner said the giveaway will not be a one-time event. She is already lining up funding, partnerships and ideas for next year.
“I did at some point say, oh, I have to keep doing this now. I’m definitely fully in for next year,” she said. “There’s no question that this is a two-year thing, at least.”
People who want to donate or get involved can find Ride and Shine Upshur on Instagram and Facebook, where a link to the organization’s website and a phone number are posted.
