Portraits of Adventure / Vultures Knob / Tom Burke
Tom Burke
Vultures Knob, Wooster OH
August 2026
Tom Burke had been riding Vulture’s Knob for at least thirty years, since 1995 or ‘96 by his best guess, he isn’t sure which, only that it was a firefighter buddy named John who brought him out and that nobody in their group had a rear shock back then, and almost nobody had a front one either. John did, and Tom remembers how impressed they all were. When they first started coming, driving the hour down from Cleveland wasn’t even a question, there was nowhere else to go besides a scattering of unofficial trails every region seems to have. VK was the place.
He and John were both firefighters together, Tom a captain on the Cleveland Fire Department until he retired about four months ago, John a lieutenant who’d retired two years before that. The trail outlasted most of the guys who used to come down with them. People fell off one by one. Tom just kept coming, a dozen times a summer most years, bringing his two sons along for as long as he can remember. They’re 22 and 23 now, busy with full-time jobs, and neither could make it out for what might be one of the last rides. Tom was a little bummed about that, especially watching John’s son, younger, still show up today in their place. Tom doesn’t race anymore. “I like to think I will,” he said. “Racing’s really hard.”
Thirty years gives a person room to watch a place change. Fern Gully didn’t exist when he started. The trail’s held up to weather better than most, something he already knows he’ll miss, learned the hard way during a race years back when a storm dumped a two-hour downpour on the place right as everyone lined up. Most people left. The ones who stuck around asked if anybody still wanted to race once it let up, and they did, and then it started raining again halfway through. “It was a total mess,” Tom said. “It was awesome.”
His favorite memory from out here involves a Halloween race and a miscommunication. His older son was around twelve. The event had been hyped up as a costume race, so Tom and his son went all in, white face paint, giant spider makeup across their foreheads. They showed up and nobody else had dressed up. Zero. His son, half-mortified, asked if his dad had the wrong day. Tom’s answer: “We’re going to own it.” They raced in full costume anyway.
Tom with his Halloween costume on - “owning it”.
Tom’s son with his Halloween costume on - “owning it”.
Not every memory out here is a light one. A friend from England, a fellow mountain biker Tom brought out to VK once and who loved it, passed away, and Tom found himself thinking about him most of the day during this last ride. “It’s like losing a friend,” he said, and he wasn’t the only one who put it that way. VK’s own board president, Carrie he’d spoken with earlier that day, used almost the exact same words without any prompting from him.
What struck him wasn’t just the sadness of it, it was the shape of it. “You think about all the people you brought out, the kids,” he said. “And then you take it for granted, just like losing a friend. You take them for granted. You’re out here, and you think you’re always going to come back. And you’re like, wait, this is the last time? What?” He half-joked about going through the five stages of grief over a bike trail, then caught himself not really joking at all.
He doesn’t know what comes next for the organization, and isn’t part of that planning himself. Retirement, for what it’s worth, has turned into exactly what he hoped. “It’s go time,” he said. He and his wife rode the Smokies this year, and he spent part of the summer on McCauley Mountain in the Adirondacks. Closer to home there’s East Rim, Bedford, West Branch, and a new build out in Chardon called Big Creek. None of them are VK. “Nothing like this,” he said, twice. He wants more people to know what it was.
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