The words “mountain biking” and “Arctic Circle” are not often associated with each other. Thoughts of snow and Santa Claus come to mind before riding dirt on two wheels. Even so, Lapland — the largest and northernmost region of Finland — is quickly becoming a riding destination for mountain bikers who are seeking adventure in the far northern regions of the globe.
Much of the hype around this area is due to the construction of new trails in the past two years by Allegra, a trail building company based in Switzerland. Singletracks spoke to Mikko Saarinen, the Managing Director and Owner of the Nordics division of Allegra, and Craig Brickser and Timo Veijalainen, both trail specialists with Allegra, to get the story behind the trails.
Lapland has traditionally struggled to generate year-round tourism
Most of Finland’s population lives in the southern part of the country. Lapland is a sparsely populated region north of the Arctic Circle that, until recently, was primarily a winter tourist destination. Saarinen told Singletracks that the region did not have many visitors in the summer months, which made things hard on the locals who depended on tourism for their income.
Saarinen said that, about five years ago, there was a real push to develop year-round tourism in Lapland to help sustain the area’s economy. Allegra was brought in to help develop a strategy to generate mountain biking tourism. The company even created a Nordics division to oversee trail development in the area and Saarinen, who had lived in the area for ten years and worked for one of the major ski resorts, became the division’s head.
Veijalainen, who had a background in winter trail building, joined the company to help with trail design, trail building, and project management. He had seen firsthand the impact winter trail riding had on the region’s economy, so he was excited to create new trails for year-round riding.
One ski resort took a chance on building a new trail
Ylläs (pronounced oo-lahs) Ski Resort, which is one of the largest ski resorts in Lapland, was an early adopter of Allegra’s proposed strategy after seeing Allegra’s flagship bike park project in Solden, Austria. It hired Allegra to build a new trail in the resort. But not just any trail — Saarinen said that the new trail (called Ylläs Flow) would be Finland’s first professionally built flow trail. Allegra hoped the project would showcase the benefits of professionally built trails and demonstrate the company’s experience in creating destination-quality trails.
To ensure the new trail’s success, Saarinen selected a crew to execute the project, combining local talent with international resources. First, they assessed the existing trails and developed a set of recommendations with trail planner Chris Bernhardt.
Next, Allegra brought in Brickser, a trail builder based in Brevard, North Carolina, to lead their pioneering trail project in Lapland. To prepare for his part in the build, Brickser used GIS and LiDAR technology to study the Arctic terrain and familiarize himself with the region. He described the region as being wild and sparsely populated. It contains Finland’s highest mountains, the Arctic Fells, which are also one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world.
A new ski lift provided the route for the flow trail
When the build team arrived at Ylläs in June of 2023, they hit the ground running. After meeting with the resort owner upon arrival, the team toured the resort the next day, walking the flag line for the proposed trail. As he walked along, Brickser noticed there wasn’t any real soil to work with. “The soils at mid-mountain were a crusted regolith of sandy cobble, silts, and decomposed rock. There were no binders or clays to be found for shaping and forming a trail tread.”
The project called for a flow trail to be built along the path of an expensive chair lift that the resort owner had recently installed. The new high-speed lift serviced the lower half of the mountain from the tree line to the mountain’s base, creating convenient access to a future hub of progression-friendly bike trails and terrain. The resort owner aimed to create the best flow trail in Finland under the lift.
The resort owner wanted the proposed trail, roughly 2km in length, built in five weeks. However, no one had attempted to build a flow trail in the rocky Arctic soil before, so there was no data to know whether the proposed timeline was feasible. The team first had to establish a baseline for productivity to find out how much could be accomplished.
Despite challenges, the build team completed the trail in the summer of 2023
The team spent nearly the entire summer building the trail. In addition to the challenging terrain, Brickser said they had to contend with adjusting to the constant daylight, unusually warm and dry weather conditions, swarms of mosquitoes, the fear of damaging underground utilities, and a lack of equipment and materials they would normally have access to in more populated regions.
Nevertheless, the Finnish people’s character helped the team overcome the obstacles they faced. Brickser told Singletracks that “the Finnish people are resilient. They don’t have complaints or demands. They inspire you to dig deep and work as hard as they do.”
The team was able to perfect the technique for building in the Arctic Fell terrain and found a balance to the production, forgoing the desire to build elaborate shapes in favor of creating the most robust trail base possible.
“The cap material the resort had available wasn’t ideal. It had almost no binders and dried out easily,” said Brickser. As a result, Brickser focused on perfecting a pre-shaped base of rocky native soil to reduce the depth of low-tension cap material needed to form the final trail surface. “In the past, most trail features had been built up almost entirely with sandy fill, leading to crumbling and erosion. So, we were really trying something new, based on our observations of what prior techniques weren’t sustainable.”
The team wrapped up construction of the trail at the beginning of August 2023. When Brickser left the country at that time, the local crew members still had finishing work left to do, so he was only able to sample a portion of the trail and had no idea if it was a success.
Ylläs Flow opened the sport of mountain biking to a wider range of riders
Saarinen and Brickser said that the existing trails in Finland catered to a specific type of rider. Brickser noticed that the existing trails “were built by hardcore riders in raw terrain, so the barrier to entry to mountain biking in Finland was high.” Saarinen echoed that sentiment, saying, “People in Finland typically think of mountain biking as an extreme sport.”
The new trail at Ylläs changed that. “The way the trail transformed the mindset of mountain biking in the local community is one of the biggest victories of the trail,” said Saarinen. After the trail was built, Saarinen said that people of all ages began riding it. Soon, the resort began holding clinics for senior riders, and many kids also rode the trail.
The trail filled a major gap in Lapland’s trail offerings, providing a gateway experience to those looking to get into the sport of mountain biking. As Veijalainen put it, “We still have a lot of rugged XC and enduro trails, and we need those too. But for developing Finnish Lapland into a great MTB destination, we need to have professionally built trails. That is the direction I see we are heading now, and it will have a big positive impact for year-round tourism and for local communities.”
It has also created a surge of trail building activity in Lapland
The success of Ylläs Flow set off a firestorm of trail building activity in Lapland. In 2024, Allegra designed and built a new jump trail in Ylläs and began building a new flow trail in Levi, Finland’s largest ski resort, with the expanded international team of Brickser, Rich Kidd, and Jesse Livingston. Allegra also began building trails in Lapland’s capital, Rovaniemi, which is known as the home of Santa Claus and the Gateway to the Arctic Circle. The addition of the second trail at Ylläs helped it win Bike Park of the Year from the Finnish Tourism Council.
Plans to build even more trails in the region are also underway. According to Saarinen, Allegra will have another busy summer in Finland in 2025. Twenty members of its team will work on various projects, expanding into new resorts and destinations and creating backcountry experiences, such as gravel routes.
“I think we have just scratched the surface,” Veijalainen told Singletracks. “I’m really happy to see that private companies such as Levi and Ylläs are developing bike park trails, building new trails, and fixing old trails. But, if we look at the whole Lapland region, the biggest sign of development is municipalities and cities willing to push more trail projects forward. I’m sure we will see more bike park projects in our region as well as cross-country trails with longer distances.”
For a place that was once known as a winter tourist destination, Lapland is quickly transforming into a premier summer riding hotspot for mountain bikers from Finland and beyond.
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Now I just need to get to Finland to ride...