Winter GravelQuest Final Report – Season 1

New for the winter of 2025/26 the GravelQuest series branches away from the Victoria Segment Challenge, offering a new platform for gravel exploration (and competition!)

The format is pretty similar – the Fall Segment Challenges have been more focused on exploration than competition, and since our fitness is on a break over the winter, the Winter GravelQuest series focused almost entirely on checking out cool new routes and trails, although we did sneak in one timed ‘challenge’ segment for fun.

In this initial season, we featured 8 weeks and over 16+ segments, running from  December 8th thru February 8th (one week around the holidays actually ran two weeks, for people who may have been away.) We visited trails throughout Royal Oak, Saanich, the Highlands and West Shore, with some trails that were new to nearly all (like in Chan Park), or were newly constructed, like the Green Room in Royal Bay!

We also included a wildlife theme, and every week featured informative tidbits about Vancouver Island wildlife and co-existence tips from The Fur-Bearers, all of which are still available on our Season 1 Archive page as well!

As well, a big thank you to local artist (as well as Segment Challenge competitor) Louis Fernet-Leclair we had a fun new twist on the series, where every week riders were awarded Island Wildlife tokens or icons (see the results sheet below), and gained points if they collected three-of-a-kind, etc.. Here’s his handy work, which I thought was pretty darn cool:

It was fun to highlight and celebrate our local wildlife this way as well! And finally, instead of the standard categories, people selected a Vancouver Island fur-bearer as their category, which made for some amusing scoreboards.

As always with our report, some quick stats:

• Number signed up: 69
• Number of people new to the Segment Challenge/GravelQuest: 20
• Number in the Strava group: over 400
• Number who rode at least one segment this season: 45
• Male:female split: 34:11

Special Recognition – The Hardcore!

The weather wasn’t always the best over the winter, and so we like to recognize the 8 riders who rode each segment! Our Hardcore riders for Season 1 were Anne Edwards, Bicycle Dave🇨🇦, Curtis Upshall, Jolene Phelps, Kevin Turenne, Tanya B, Dan Coulton and Greg Goforth!  (I also made it out each week, but not sure if I should count! 😉)

More Neat Stats

Here’s a few charts from our Season 1 sign-up as well (note we had 69 people sign up, but a number never did joined in – hope to see you next season!!) Here are some of those details:

Here’s the breakdown of categories, Team River Otter had the most selections with 20 people, but Team Bear had only 6 riders.

Have people joined ATR events in the past?

20 people were all-new, yay!

And what was everyone riding:

Gravel bikes still rule, followed by All Road and CX.

I’m also curious what size tires folks are riding:

Good to see more people are getting on fatter rubber, with the vast majority on 36mm or bigger!

And one more question for riders:

Wow – the double chainring rules supreme! TBH you’ll have to pry my front mech away from my cold, dead hands. 😂

The Series Final – Our Podiums 🏆

Now for the IMPORTANT stuff. Well not really, but it’s still neat, and is lightly competitive after all!

If you want to check out the Season 1 Archives, you can find all the segments we did here!

Props to all who took part, I’m grateful to have you join us in these silly grassroots cycling series.

Team Cougars

We had five Cougars out for season one, and Anne E was our top finisher and season winner! Mark C and Dave B actually tied for second, and Mark B was just two points behind for bronze. It was great seeing Lynn out for the first week, hopefully she’ll be back for more next season!

1. Anne Edwards (38pts)
2. Mark Classen / Dave Bitschy (27pts)
3. Mark Baker (25pts)

Team Raccoons

Bicycle Dave not only cleaned the clocks of all ten Raccoons, but scored the most in the series with a whopping 59pts! A few Early Bird points, plus several fantastic videos shared on social media helps shore up his score!

Curtis was next-best with 41pts, and tied for 3rd, one point down, were Rich and myself! Josh, Gary and Michael J were just off the podium, and great having out Darryl, Mike H and Janice D!

1. Bicycle Dave (59pts)
2. Curtis Upshall (41pts)
3. Rich Long / Vegan Dave Shishkoff (40pts)

Team Bears

Another group of five, Sonya came out on top here, two points ahead of Rose, with Renata rounding out the podium. Great seeing Tyler G and Kevin D out for some segments as well!

1. Sonya Bird (32pts)
2. Rose Aarrestad (30pts)
3. Renata Troc (21pts)

Team River Otters

The River Otters had the most members, with 11, and the podium was separated by just 3pts! Jolene was our top finisher with 44pts, including a pretty speedy timed segment! Markus and Tanya B tied for 2nd just one point behind, and Kevin T was a couple points further back to round out the podium. Scott H and David R just missed the podium, and great riding from Brayden, Chris VS, Greg R, Maria and Adam B who completed this popular group!

1. Jolene Phelps (44pts)
2. Marcus K / Tanya B (43pts)
3. Kevin Turenne (41pts)

Team Seals

Our Seals were the smallest group with just four hairless riders, but Lauren W purportedly really enjoyed the series, and came out on top in the group! Kit and Mikael complete the podium, with Sam P last but not least.

1. Lauren Westmacott (30pts)
2. Kit St. John (20pts)
3. Mikael Jansson (12pts)

Team Wolves

Tied with Raccoons with 10 riders, Dan C was our top howler! Greg G and John F round out the podium, with Jon B and Ken T just missing out! Great rides by Joel C, Ryan T, David K and Bread C as well!

1. Dan Coulton (43pts)
2. Greg Goforth (35pts)
3. John Fletcher (28pts)

Pretty fun to mix up the teams for this season, great riding all!!!

Note in the scoring sheet the tabs at the bottom to flip between overall and individual weeks. If a PDF is preferred, simply click here! Here is the full link to the GoogleDoc. (You can view the Notes each week for the Bonus and Curse details, which doesn’t show up in the table below.)

Finishing Up!

What a great group of gravel riders! It was really fun experimenting with this format, and for the Fall I’m planning to return to the more traditional 1/4 timed segments, and then this format for the Winter of 2026/27.

Given this is a blog post, whatever you do, do NOT add a comment below. 😂 It’s great hearing what you enjoy about the series, share some stories, and who knows, might inspire someone else to join in as well!

Other than the Scrabblethon on March 1st, we’re about done with the trails until the fall, hope to see some of you on the road!!

As always, safe and speedy riding!!

– Dave