Thunder Bay mountain bike trail system being expanded

A north-side mountain bike trail system is being expanded in the coming months, something riders say is much-needed given the surging popularity of the sport.

The expansion of the Trowbridge Falls trail system is expected to begin in May, and the work will add about 15 kilometres of trail and some other amenities such as a bike skills park, to the area.

"It really came about by the perseverance of the Black Sheep Mountain Bike Club," said Werner Schwar, the city's supervisor of parks and open space planning. "They put the time and effort to apply for lots of grant funding from different levels of government and they were able to receive some of that."

"And that allowed us, the city, to work with them, to start to implement a lot of the things that were coming out of Trowbridge Forest Recreation Trail Master Plan that was done a few years ago."

The work will take place over the next two years and cost a total of about $1.5 million.

Schwar said the work will include building a connecting trail to Balsam Street, adding another trail in the Centennial Park area and the construction of a bike skills park will also be built at Trowbridge.

Schwar said the trail development process is an extensive one.

"There is a document that we use to look at trails, specifically," he said. "There's something called the Whistler Standard, and also the Mountain Bike Association has a document for sustainable trail building. So that really looks at areas where it can happen, what kind of alignment should happen, slopes, side slopes, all that kind of stuff gets looked at."

In the case of Trowbridge, there are also archeological heritage concerns, which are also looked at before deciding where a trail may go.

"Then the route gets flagged, I walk it with Blacksheep to look for any concerns and we adjust the alignment, and we walk over the project with an archeologist to look for any archeological concerns," Schwar said.

The trail is then roughed out, inspected, and finalized.

"What makes it mountain bike-optimized is just the notion now of flow riding," he said. "That up-and-downs and corners aren't super sharp, so people don't lose their momentum."

"It kind of uses the landscape as the cue for how to do the trail, not sort of being superimposed upon it, like steeps ups and steep downs that encourage erosion later on," Schwar said. "The idea being that if it's well-designed for the bike flow, then it also works well for the other users."

Growing in popularity

Blacksheep Mountain Bike Club vice-president Mark Maranzan said the work is much-needed, as mountain biking has grown in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said Blacksheep's membership rose from 130 in 2018 to just shy of 400 last year; a trail counter system installed at one of the access points in the Trowbridge area is logging well over 1,000 hits per month.

"People are starved for something to do, and sports is definitely where most people are trying to find their outlet," Maranzan said. "Try finding a mountain bike for sale in North America at this point in time — you won't find one."

Maranzan said the trail expansion will help when travel rules are relaxed, as well.

"We know being on the TransCanada Highway, we get a lot of cross-Canada travel," he said, adding people travelling with bikes may want to spend some extra time in the city to try out the trails at Trowbridge.

"We think that we could easily attract anywhere from 10 to 20,000 riders a year, if we can get the right infrastructure in place," he said.