Watch: ‘Long Live Digger’ pays homage to a Canadian icon

Vancouver’s North Shore is internationally renowned as a mountain bike destination, particularly among those interested in the more technical side of the sport. Todd “Digger” Fiander is, perhaps more than any other single person, responsible for putting the North Shore on the map (and keeping it there).

As a trail builder, he constructed several of the most iconic trails and has maintained for decades. Behind a camera, his North Shore EXtreme series of hand-shot VHS movies were the first glimpse for many of what was happening in North Van, across Canada and around the world.

As Rapha gets into mountain biking, it was inevitable the brand would eventually find its way to this particularly janky part of Canada.

Why is a brand with its U.S. base in California visiting North Vancouver’s rain forests now? Well, it recently released a full-on wet weather version of its trail jacket. So why not head to a notoriously wet and damp part of the world to test it out. The riding’s not bad, either.

Rapha: Long Live Digger, Long Live the Shore

What’s Rapha say about these twin icons of Canadian mountain biking?

The saturated, mercurial landscape of British Columbia’s North Shore has been cemented in many riders’ minds as the birthplace of modern mountain biking. The fern-lined and root-entangled trails of this region were captured and circulated in the glossy pages of print magazines and influential VHS tapes, including the North Shore Extreme series that revealed trails unlike anything we’d ever seen before. Grainy, handheld video depicted skillful bike handling on originative features, all built by hand on steep and deep terrain.

Todd “Digger” Fiander, whose name is synonymous with the massively influential North Shore style of trailbuilding, was the mastermind behind many of these trails. He continues to sculpt singletrack from the rich soil of Mount Fromme to this day.