Sudbury, Ontario, boasts a wide array of technically demanding mountain bike trails where rugged rock slabs and relentless terrain put riders to the test. While the area may not have thousands of feet of elevation to descend, these rocky trail systems are scattered all across the region.
One of Sudbery’s trail systems recognized that perhaps their trails didn’t offer the same exhilarating experience as others in the area. Now, they hope to change that with help from a quarter-million dollar grant.
A centenarian gifted the land for Kivi Park to the community
Kivi Park is located south of Sudbury, a few skips across the area’s many lakes. The park’s history begins with Sudbury philanthropist Lily Fielding, who loved skiing, hiking, and anything outdoors.
Fielding began purchasing parcels of land in what would become the Kivi Park area, as it was one of her favorite locations to recreate. In 2016, at age 100, Fielding gifted the 480 acres of land she accumulated to the Sudbury community to provide an outdoor playground.
“In the end, it was about a $7.5 million donation back to the community,” Kerry Lamarche, Executive Director of Kivi Parks, told us.
In the years that followed, Kivi Park expanded exponentially, adding multi-use trails for hiking, mountain biking, adaptive biking, fat tire biking, and Nordic ski paths. All told, Kivi Park has roughly 100km of trails just 15 minutes from the nearly 200,000 residents of Sudbury. While the park itself is 480 privately owned acres, much of it borders “Crown land” — land owned by the Canadian government — and some trails at Kivi venture onto this land.
While park passes and donations help cover the cost of maintenance at Kivi Park, the cost of reworking and expanding existing trails isn’t — something Kivi Park desperately needs. However, a $256,500 grant from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario (FedNor) will help the park redesign and expand roughly 21km of trail. This redesign will also include building small segments of trails to make connections throughout 18km of the 21km.
Better trails in Kivi Park
In its early years, Kivi Park prioritized the rapid development of trails, laying the groundwork for a multi-use outdoor destination. From 2016 to roughly 2019, hiking, skiing, and biking trail infrastructure were the focus. While the park boasts world-class cross-country skiing and phenomenal views from the hiking trails, the mountain biking trails were admittedly overlooked.
Neighboring Sudbury trail systems like Walden, Laurentian, and Azilda, have long been the go-to spots for local mountain bikers, often drawing riders away from Kivi Park. Lamarche said the issue lies with Kivi being built as quickly as it was.
“And then when we get into the bike trails, really it was we’ve got 480 acres, and they just really tried to jam-pack as much terrain as they could,” Lamarche told us. “So the initial feedback is [things like] there are too many switchbacks, or it’s not really flowing.”
Lamarche shared that the focus of this next phase of trail building at Kivi is to bring the bike trails up to the standard she and other riders feel they should be at. Fortunately, many kilometers of trail are already on the ground; it is just a matter of making better connections and creating better flow. Currently, getting from one mountain biking trail to another could mean connecting via a hiking trail. Lamarche hopes to address these issues with funds from the FedNor grant.
They also plan to remove some switchbacks from existing trails to create faster and flowier sections. However, it is still important that Kivi Park remains accessible to all, including younger and newer riders, as well as the elderly. While redesigning and connecting certain trails will create faster, flowier segments, Kivi Park will also continue to have easier trail sections to accommodate all.
New trails coming to Kivi Park
Work has already begun on the trails at Kivi Park. Once it was confirmed that Kivi Park would receive the grant funds, shovels hit the dirt in June 2024, with over three kilometers of connector trails in the middle of the park being built first.
“I would say [the trails] are not even recognizable to what they were,” Lamarche said. “They reworked sight lines and fall lines, adding a ton of berms, and all that kind of fun stuff.”
Work will restart once the snow melts, and phase one — connecting and redesigning existing trails — will continue. Phase two includes adding roughly three kilometers of all-new trails.
While Sudbury doesn’t have huge amounts of elevation gain or loss, natural areas around the town are rocky, with large slabs and ridges. One of these massive escarpments of rock runs through the middle of Kivi Park, creating a squirrel catcher of sorts for more technically challenging trails.
The three new kilometers of trail are planned to run along and drop off this ridge. While there is a plan for these new trails, nothing has been flagged yet. According to Lamarche, that was done intentionally.
“Trail builders get really excited for new trails. If I let them start there, no one’s going to want to add another berm to trail one,” she joked. “I’ll make them do all the work that is a little bit less exciting, and then, next year, let them open the floodgates for a little bit more creativity and developing some new trails.”
Despite little being known about these new trails, Lamarche said the ridge is raw and technical, and the trails should follow suit.
Lamarche hopes the redesign and connecting of existing trails can be wrapped up in 2025, with construction of the new trails in 2026. They hope to have the new trails built that same year. It is a lofty goal, but one they hope is achievable, as much of the new trails will be on rock slabs.
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