Ride to Vote: Amflow and Avinox Are Handing $10,000 to a Trail Association — and Your Laps Decide Who Gets It
Most grant competitions are decided by committee — a panel of well-meaning strangers reading PDFs in a conference room somewhere, scoring proposals against rubrics that rarely capture the actual sweat, callouses, and weekend mornings that go into building and maintaining a trail. The Amflow Avinox Trail Advocacy Program isn't doing it that way. Instead, the brand is letting the mountain bike community vote with the one currency that actually means something in this sport: time in the saddle.
The four finalists in the Amflow Avinox Trail Advocacy Program have been selected, and the winning trail association — which takes home $10,000 USD and up to three eMTBs — will be decided the only way that actually matters: by riding mountain bikes. That's not marketing copy. It's the literal mechanism of the contest. Log a ride, cast a vote. The association with the most ride logs wins the money.
The voting window runs from October 22, 2026 until November 12, 2026, and every single ride logged on Trailforks counts as a vote for a chosen finalist. Every mountain bike or e-bike ride logged on Trailforks after picking a trail association counts as a vote for them, automatically — rides logged before picking count too, as soon as a selection is made. One vote is counted per day, no matter how many rides are logged, and rides must be at least five minutes long. Rides from the Trailforks app, website uploads, Garmin, and other connected devices all count — but rides imported from Strava don't.
Who Are the Four Finalists?
The program selected four associations out of a national pool of applicants, each pitching a specific, tangible project with a clear budget and community benefit. These aren't vague "trail improvement" proposals — they're detailed construction and restoration plans with line-item budgets, real timelines, and genuine community stakes. Here's what each of them is actually trying to build or fix.
SORBA Chattanooga: Stringer's Ridge Trail Rehab and Fire Resilience
Stringer's Ridge Park — a 92-acre forested urban park two miles from downtown Chattanooga that sees roughly 75,000 annual visits and generates $6.9 million in local economic impact — is seeking a $10,000 grant to fund critical trail restoration and wildfire mitigation. The numbers alone make this project's stakes clear. A park that close to a city center, pulling that level of economic activity, is trail infrastructure that functions more like a municipal asset than a recreational amenity.
To address these threats, the grant will allocate $7,250 for contractor-led mechanized drainage and erosion repairs, $2,000 for certified sawyers to remove leaning hazard trees and deadfall that spread rolling fire across slopes, $500 to support volunteer workdays, and $250 to replace fire-damaged signage. That budget breakdown tells you a lot about what the trails are dealing with — not just deferred maintenance, but active fire damage to infrastructure that was already in need of technical drainage work. SORBA Chattanooga isn't asking for money to dream up new trails. They're asking for money to save the ones thousands of people are already riding every year.
NEMBA Central Maine: The Surry Hill Loop Trail
This project will construct a 1.5–2 mile machine-built perimeter loop trail at Surry Hill — a ground-up network developed by a non-profit on Kennebec Land Trust property — bringing its overall master plan to 75% completion. The Surry Hill network is one of those projects that only exists because a small, determined group decided to build something where nothing existed before, working with conservation land managers to do it right.
Designed with a hub-and-spoke layout centered on a summit hub that serves local riders, pedestrian hikers, and a nearby high school mountain bike team, the new flow trail will incorporate native soils and rocks for optional technical features accessible to both advanced-beginners and expert riders. Completing this perimeter loop finishes a critical connector that unlocks the property's final phase — two new descending trails and a climbing trail — while leveraging grant funding to trigger a 1:1 local matching contribution. That matching mechanic makes this one of the higher-leverage investments in the finalist pool. Every dollar from Amflow effectively turns into two on the ground.
The build will be executed by the organization's unique paid youth trail crew model, where 8–10 high school and college-aged crew members gain hands-on machine operation and trail-building skills under professional adult supervision. That's the kind of community investment that multiplies well beyond any single trail — it's building a generation of people who know how to maintain and advocate for the trails they ride.
Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance: Raging River Black Diamond Trail
Led by a husband-and-wife team with approximately 200 volunteer hours already invested, this completely hand-built, volunteer-driven project is constructing a 0.75-mile black-diamond trail branching off an existing blue flow line to create the Raging River trail network's only sanctioned, bottom-to-bottom advanced route. The Raging River network in Washington State has long been a Pacific Northwest staple, and the absence of a dedicated advanced line through the system has been a consistent gap for riders seeking something beyond the blue-level flow experience.
Operating without allocated funding, the project seeks a $10,000 grant to purchase heavy-material moving equipment, tools, safety gear, and volunteer workday refreshments over six months of planned work parties running two to four sessions per month, ensuring the efficient construction and long-term community stewardship of a safe, sustainable trail. Two hundred volunteer hours already spent before a single dollar of grant funding — that's the kind of commitment that most formal construction crews couldn't match at any price.
Northern Michigan Mountain Bike Association: Materials and Permanent Signage
This ongoing trail expansion project — recently approved by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources for an additional 64 miles — integrates former rogue trails into the existing 20-plus-mile network to build an interconnected, 84-mile backcountry system upgraded to modern standards. Northern Michigan's trail riding scene has long flown under the radar compared to western destinations, but projects like this one are exactly why that reputation is changing. An 84-mile interconnected system, built to modern sustainable standards, on DNR-sanctioned land, is a destination-level network that rivals anything in the Midwest.
The emphasis on signage and materials suggests the project is in a construction and formalization phase — transitioning informal routes into a properly marked, maintained network with the kind of infrastructure that makes trails usable and safe for riders at all experience levels. Formalizing rogue trails also protects access, transforming potentially contentious land-use situations into sanctioned partnerships with public land managers.
How the Voting Mechanics Actually Work
The most interesting thing about this program isn't the prize money — it's how the vote is structured. No popularity contests or sketchy online bot voting here: once the four finalists are set, the winning trail association is decided the only way that actually matters, by riding mountain bikes. That design choice eliminates the biggest problem with internet-based advocacy votes, which is that they tend to reward whoever has the largest social media following or the most aggressive bot network rather than the most committed riding community.
By tying votes to actual ride logs, the program creates a self-correcting system. The association that wins will be the one whose supporters ride the most — which is, arguably, the most honest possible measure of a mountain bike community's engagement. You can't vote from a couch. You can't vote in bulk. You can't game it with a spreadsheet.
During the 22-day voting window, every single ride logged on Trailforks counts as a vote for a chosen finalist. Opening the app, logging laps, and selecting which local association you want to reach the top of the leaderboard is all it takes. The mechanics are clean: pick your association once, then keep riding. The platform handles the rest automatically.
Once the winning association is crowned, the program kicks off the Ride for Your Trail Association Challenge so that all four finalist trail associations can unlock their new work fleet. A $10,000 check buys plenty of lumber, dirt, and gravel, but it doesn't haul a pulaski and three chainsaws four miles up a 12% grade. That second phase — the eMTB earn-out for all four finalists — is where the program's practical intelligence really shows. Trail maintenance equipment that can actually access backcountry terrain is expensive and hard to source. eMTBs purpose-built for that kind of work are exactly what organizations with limited budgets and ambitious projects need.
Why Amflow Is Doing This — and What It Says About eMTB's Trail Access Problem
This program didn't appear in a vacuum. It's a direct response to one of the loudest and most sustained criticisms leveled at Amflow and the Avinox drive system since their debut at Eurobike 2024: that the brand has been willing to sell powerful electric bikes into markets where trail access debates are already fraught, without putting meaningful resources into the advocacy work that underpins that access.
Since Eurobike 2024, Amflow and DJI have been the talk of the town. The Amflow PL Carbon e-MTB, equipped with DJI's brand-new Avinox motor system, boasts impressive specs and belongs to a new generation of e-mountain bikes. In Boost mode, it churns out up to 120 Nm of torque and 1,000 watts peak power, while in normal mode it delivers 105 Nm and 850 watts. Those numbers were unprecedented when the bike launched, and they immediately ignited debates about where eMTBs belong, how they should be regulated, and whether a 1,000-watt motor genuinely belongs in the "Class 1" conversation.
Avinox has acknowledged the need to engage: "We're still quite a new player and there are so many things going on, but we've basically made the decision to join PeopleForBikes," said Ferdinand Wolf of Avinox. "We know we need skin in the game when it comes to trail access... and once we join those associations we can also look into supporting projects, trail development, things like that." The trail advocacy program is the first concrete, public-facing evidence of that commitment materializing into actual dollars.
Amflow and Avinox are now positioned as independent brands, but both were launched with strong technological backing from their parent company, DJI. While Amflow aims to establish itself as a standalone bike brand, Avinox operates as an independent supplier of drive systems. That independence matters for the trail advocacy conversation: as Avinox grows its roster of OEM partners beyond Amflow, its stake in trail access policy grows proportionally. A drive system manufacturer whose motors power bikes across dozens of brands has an enormous incentive to keep trails open for all of them.
Critics have been direct about the stakes. Reviewers and community members noted early on that marketing a 1,000-watt mode on a trail bike was shortsighted for what remains a fragile access environment. The concern isn't abstract — eMTBs with this kind of power output give land managers and competing trail user groups exactly the ammunition they need to argue against eMTB access on non-motorized trails. Every time a rider hammers up a closed trail at full Boost, it costs every other eMTB rider on every other trail in the country a little bit of goodwill they can't afford to lose.
The Avinox motor powering the Amflow eMTB platform is quickly becoming one of the most disruptive drive systems in the electric mountain bike world — it's not just another incremental motor update, but a system that's changing how riders think about torque delivery, shifting, battery design, firmware management, and even bike setup philosophy. That disruption demands responsibility. The trail advocacy program is a recognition that the brand can't just be a hardware company that sells into the mountain bike world without actively investing in the infrastructure that makes that world possible.
The Bigger Picture: What Trail Funding Actually Looks Like in America
To understand why $10,000 matters so much to these organizations, it helps to understand what trail building and maintenance actually costs — and who normally pays for it. The short answer is: not enough people, and never enough money. America's trail infrastructure runs primarily on volunteer labor, small grants, and whatever local trail associations can raise through membership dues, merchandise sales, and the occasional generous donor. Federal land management agencies — the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service — have trail maintenance backlogs that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. State DNR offices are chronically understaffed for the trail management workload they carry.
Into that gap step organizations like SORBA, NEMBA, Evergreen, and NMMBA. These are the groups that actually show up on weekday mornings with hand tools, that organize work parties in the rain, that negotiate land-use agreements with conservation trusts and public agencies, that spend their own money on materials before a grant check ever clears. They are, in every meaningful sense, the reason most American singletrack exists at all.
A $10,000 grant to an organization operating at this level isn't a token gesture — it's a serious capital infusion. Consider what SORBA Chattanooga plans to do with it: $7,250 for contractor-led mechanized drainage and erosion repairs, $2,000 for certified sawyers to remove leaning hazard trees and deadfall that spread rolling fire across slopes, $500 to support volunteer workdays, and $250 to replace fire-damaged signage. That's a complete project budget, right down to the signage. For an organization accustomed to scraping together resources one fundraiser at a time, that kind of lump-sum funding can unlock work that would otherwise take years to accomplish.
The eMTB component of the prize — up to three bikes for the winning association, and a potential fleet of up to 12 bikes across all four finalists through the subsequent challenge — addresses a different but equally real problem. Trail maintenance at scale, especially on backcountry systems like the NMMBA project, requires the ability to access remote terrain efficiently. An eMTB doesn't replace a full-size machine for heavy earthmoving, but it absolutely transforms how efficiently a small crew can assess, mark, and do lighter maintenance work on a multi-mile backcountry network. The ability to cover ground quickly without exhausting the crew before the real work begins is not a trivial advantage.
How to Vote and Why It's Worth Your Time
If you're already logging rides on Trailforks — and if you're riding trails in America in 2026, you probably should be — participating in this vote costs you exactly nothing extra. During the voting window from October 22, 2026 until November 12, 2026, every single ride logged on Trailforks counts as a vote for a chosen finalist. Open the app, select which local association you want to make it to the top of the leaderboard, and start logging laps. The community with the most ride logs attributed to it takes home the grand prize.
If you're not already on Trailforks, this is the moment to get on it. The platform is free, it's the most comprehensive trail database in the world, and it syncs with Garmin and most other popular devices. Rides from the Trailforks app, website uploads, Garmin, and other connected devices all count. Setup takes about ten minutes, and after that your normal riding is doing meaningful work for the community that built the trails you're enjoying.
The choice of which finalist to support is personal. Riders in Chattanooga, central Maine, the Pacific Northwest, and northern Michigan each have obvious home-team reasons to log laps for their local association. But the vote is open to everyone, regardless of where they ride, and there's a reasonable argument for supporting whichever project you think will create the most lasting value — the most riders served, the most terrain unlocked, the most community infrastructure built. The four projects represent genuinely different visions of what trail investment can look like, from urban park restoration to backcountry network expansion to next-generation youth trail crew models.
An Industry Watching Closely
The Amflow Avinox Trail Advocacy Program is being watched carefully by people inside and outside the mountain bike industry, for reasons that go well beyond which trail association gets a check. It's one of the first meaningful tests of whether a high-powered eMTB brand can genuinely thread the needle between selling an aggressively capable product and being a responsible actor in a trail access environment that remains politically fragile.
Industry rumors suggest Amflow reportedly sold 30,000 bikes globally in 2025. At that scale, the brand's behavior has real consequences for how land managers, advocacy organizations, and competing trail user groups perceive the entire eMTB category. A brand selling bikes at that volume that actively funds trail infrastructure sends a fundamentally different message than one that simply markets its way into the sport and leaves the access work to others.
The structure of this program — community-driven, ride-verified, transparent, with real money going to organizations doing real work — suggests that at least some people inside Amflow and Avinox understand what's actually at stake. Whether it's enough to shift the broader conversation around high-powered eMTB access remains to be seen. But it's a start, and it's the right kind of start: concrete, tangible, and built around the one thing that actually unites everyone arguing about eMTBs in the first place. Getting out and riding.
The window is open through November 12, 2026. Go ride something. Log it. Make it count for the people who built the trail under your tires.
