When the great outlaw Galbraith trail builder Dan Waters built his ground breaking (pun intended) Dan's Trail in the late '90s, it was a secret trail with all sorts of brush and debris piled up where the trail intersected the Tower Rd. / 3000 Rd.

It was big news on Galbraith in the summer of 2000 when Dan tore out the trail block and went public with his work, so you could ride from the Tower Rd. straight into Dan's Trail (pictured at RIGHT). Too cool!

Riding Galbraith in those days, you felt like you could encounter a secret trail at any time, suddenly and unexpectedly passing through a hidden portal to another world, sort of like where Will's "subtle knife" cut a passage between parallel worlds in Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials.

TODAY MOST ESTABLISHED trails are "legal" on land owned by Polygon Financial (which acquired much of Galbraith in 2009 when the prior owner, Trillium Corp., defaulted on a loan), and the WHIMPs (which siezed management of mountain biking on Galbraith during Trillium's ownwership) have driven Dan Waters off the mountain with a Cease And Desist Letter, but -- oddly -- the number of "secret trails" on Galbraith has increased.

How can this be? Well, the easy answer is that a whole new generation of gifted trail builders has come foreward. While many of the men who literally built Galbraith -- legendary Galbraith figures like Bob Torset and Dan Waters -- are no longer active on the mountain, there are now many more hands and many more polaskis.

In fact, the mountain's volunteer trail builders have been exceptionally busy over the last couple years. "We're like beavers," said prolific Galbraith cross-country trail builder, Guano. "We have to keep building trails to wear down our teeth."

Guano should know. He and his odd-couple trail building partner, freeride flash Legendary David (pictured at LEFT), are responsible for four of the trails on the GalbraithMt.com Secret Trail List, namely Kaya, Mole Trap, Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, the later two combining to create a complex loop-within-a-loop of exceptionally sweet cross country ripping.

So without further ado, here are the Top 10 Secret Trails on Galbraith today. Only two -- the aforementioned Goldilocks and the 3 Bears -- are depicted on the map on the Trillium Kiosks, and the Trillium map has it mega-wrong.

Every one of these trails deserves to be better known. They're all excellent -- none is a "second" -- and the Banjoland, Art's Trail, Bunny Trails, Kaya combo offers the best beginner trails on the mountain. Happy trails...