Portraits of Adventure / Vultures Knob / Alyssa Haberern
Alyssa Haberern
Vultures Knob, Wooster OH
August 2026
“I never conquered the cradle. I can’t, I have to come back. I have to ride it before it’s gone.” Alyssa Haberern said it to her roommate Carrie the day she found out Vulture’s Knob was closing, half the practical plan, half the real reason. She’d crashed on the cradle back in 2023, her second time ever on a mountain bike, overconfident off an easy warmup loop and too proud to walk the one feature that actually scared her. Concussion, then a second crash minutes later on a different drop, on a borrowed bike that got torn apart for parts after that ride. She came back again last year, got partway into the cradle, and walked the rest of it instead. This year she rode the whole loop clean, cradle and suspension bridge both.
“I almost didn’t ride the cradle,” she said. “I was scared. But being able to come back and do that before it’s gone, it’s a big deal.”
It would be easy to read that as a rider closing out one trail feature before it’s gone for good. Alyssa doesn’t let it stay that small. “It’s definitely like a symbol of a new beginning for me,” she said, and she means all of it: leaving Pennsylvania for the first time in her life, moving to Ohio, picking up mountain biking, picking up harder and scarier sports in general. Underneath that is something plainer. “I hate when I don’t finish a challenge or give up on something.” VK closing didn’t make the cradle matter more. It just turned it into a deadline for something she’d already decided she owed herself.
She didn’t grow up thinking this would be her life. Vet tech was the plan, the whole plan, until the schooling didn’t stick. What actually moved something in her was a college adventure team, ropes courses, a camping trip, a backpacking trip. “That was the time I was in my element. I need to be outside.” She chased that feeling into a job at Camp Nahop, an outdoor education camp in Perrysville, Ohio, in part because it solved the practical problem of rent and let her bring her dog, in part because it finally let her go after what she actually wanted.
Carrie was already out here, a friend from college through Alyssa’s sister, and that’s most of why Ohio made sense at all. What was supposed to be one weekend crashing at Carrie’s place, after Alyssa hit a deer and totaled the car she’d been planning to live out of, turned into two years. They rode together regularly until Carrie’s health slowed things down, and Alyssa lost the one riding partner who understood what it was like to still be learning.
She’s honest that she carries an extra weight into something like mountain biking that has nothing to do with the trail itself, the expectation that a fall gets read differently because she’s a woman, that “girls can’t do it.” She’s working through the same thing with climbing. But at VK specifically, Carrie got her in, Mel rides, plenty of other women ride, and she spent her first seasons there on a borrowed bike with nobody treating that as a problem. “Everyone here just helps each other get through,” she said. “It’s very inclusive and welcoming.”
It’s the same thing she’s building now for other people. She didn’t have an outdoor childhood of her own. Tour guiding in Moab, a survival skills job at a day camp outside Denver, now outdoor education at the YMCA of the Rockies, ropes courses, hikes, winter programs she’s still learning herself. “I think the more time we spend outside, the happier and friendlier we are,” she said. “It’s just something you go pay to do for a day and then you go back home and it’s not part of your life... connecting people back to being outside, that’s kind of my passion.”
She’s upfront that she’s not one of VK’s old guard. “I’m not even that connected and well versed. I still don’t know where I am once I get past certain points.” But she’s watched the real thing up close, through the people who are. “This is their baby,” she said of guys like Nate, Perry, and John. Nate rode almost every day after work until a stretch away, and told her before he left, “I just have this feeling that when I come back the knob is going to be gone,” riding like he was already running out of time. Perry has put everything into making VK what it is. John knows the trail “better than somebody who knows their own street that they grew up on.”
For them, Alyssa thinks, this isn’t a trail closing. “It’s almost like losing a family member. A huge part of their life.” She only got a few years of it. That was enough to see what losing it costs the people who got decades.
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