Portraits of Adventure / Vultures Knob / Jason Reinhardt
Jason Reinhardt
Vultures Knob, Wooster OH
August 2026
“I asked, I asked my wife to marry me here. My daughter’s graduation party was here.” For Jason, the Knob didn’t just exist on weekends and evening rides, it imprinted on him, deeply enough that he built his own family’s milestones into the ground itself, a marriage proposal in one generation, a daughter’s graduation in the next. “That’s how big of a deal it was to me,” he said. “It was my whole life.”
Jason started riding here as soon as the first trail was scratched into the earth. Mid-90s, fall of ‘95 or ‘96 by his own best guess, Todd Caldwell, who lived in a trailer on site, talked Mark Condry into letting him scratch a trail into the property. Mountain biking was still in its infancy then, a bike with even just front suspension would have caught the attention of anyone who rode, most frames were fully rigid. “It was Mecca in the beginning, everybody had tickets for riding in the Cuyahoga Valley, this place provided a legal place to ride your bike.”
Mark always said, why make it easy when we can make it hard. Duck calls started the races. He’d drag a boulder into the trail just to see if anyone would ride over it. At one point a bridge spanned a ravine twenty-three feet up with no railing at all, and you rolled over the top of it carrying your speed, nothing to hold onto. All of it on 26 inch wheels, long before 27.5s or 29ers, half the bikes out there barely had any suspension at all.
A bridge spans the ravine reaching a height of almost 23’ tall. | 2009
Industry names showed up too. Gary Fisher came out for a night race in the expert class and didn’t make it past one lap. “You guys are nuts,” he said, and DNF’d. Roddy Walters kept that same spirit of theater going even after Mark stepped back, race starts that had nothing to do with racing, a tricycle start, a kiddie car race, a prologue lap where you had to eat a powdered donut and a spoonful of peanut butter before you could keep going. There’s a photo Jason still has of himself holding a black snake he caught trailside at the bottom of the pines. Somebody paid him seventy dollars for it on the spot.
Jason Meets Gary Fisher | May 2001
A kiddy car race as a prologue to the start of the mountain bike race
One night stands above the rest for him. A 24-hour race, a storm rolling through and shutting things down for a couple hours, then clearing right as he went out for his four a.m. lap. Tiki torches lit the swamp section, black snakes draped over the half-submerged bridges, steam rising off the water in the dark. “It was a magical lap for sure,” he said.
Jason earns $70 for catching and producing a Black Snake at the end of the 24 hour race | 2001
These trails don’t build themselves, and it’s probably fair to say the work going into the trail hooked Jason as much as the riding did. “This place, because it was a landfill, there was trash all over the place. There was scrap iron all over the place, all this metal, I mean, it was nasty.” Jason spent thousands of hours at the Knob cleaning up trash, working on better drainage and sustainability through modern trail building methods. “But that was the plan. Thousands and thousands, I put thousands and thousands of hours into this place. Every turn, every bridge, every everything, you know, it was, we did that.”
Trail work in 2009
To date, Jason’s had two shoulder surgeries, a thrown out back, and bad knees, most of it earned from the trail work itself. The back came in 2017, an early warm day in February, five guys behind him, his new trail dog running out front. He had his head down, watching the dog instead of the trail, and rode full speed into a low hanging branch. He compressed his vertebrae and broke his T1, and had to be carried out on a stretcher. “You’re landing on rocks if you hit the ground around here,” he said. “That’s why so many people got hurt. But that’s the lure of Vulture’s Knob. White knuckles and big smiles, that’s what we always said.”
Jason riding the under on the black line: “Under Over”.
Jason’s outdoor shop turned into a bike shop because of VK, and by 2009 he was selling $10,000 custom bikes out of it. “The Edge and Vulture’s Knob was one and the same,” he said. That pull is what led him and four other guys to take on a land contract to buy the place outright, funded through the races they ran through 3-3-1 Racing, aiming to “secure this for mountain bikers forever.” The better part of a decade of thousands of hours went into it.
Team photo against house structure torn down while trail was active.
Then his shop closed right as the contract deadline did, and neither he nor his partners had the money left to finish the deal. Someone else took it on instead. He stayed away for years, mad it wasn’t his anymore. “The knob rides better than it ever has,” he says now. “I’m glad somebody has the passion we had for it. But I’m mad we weren’t taking care of it.”
Trail work | 2009
Jason’s birthday is August 31st. He’s kept a birthday ride going for thirty years. This year he and a few friends rode through VK at dusk, and somewhere in that ride he decided, on his own, that this was it, the last lap. “I tell myself in my head that we did the last lap of Vulture’s Knob,” he said. They got a photo of the group on the over-under bridge to mark it.
Jason Racing |
Then he got a puppy two days later, skipped a ride for it, and rode the trail again the following Monday anyway. The last lap wasn’t actually last. That doesn’t undo the one before it, the one where he’d already closed the book on his own terms, before anyone or anything closed it for him. It’s the same instinct that put a ring on his wife’s finger on this same ground years earlier. He doesn’t wait to be told something matters. He marks it himself, and lets the place catch up to the decision after the fact.
Start line near future “Lizard Lounge”
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