Mountain bike trail organizations around the world have a big problem: “It’s always easier to build new trail than it is to maintain existing trail,” said Jono Baddiley, Past President of the Wellington Mountain Bike Club (WMBC). “When we were building Trail 16, we were getting 25 to 26 people turning on a Sunday afternoon to dig for three or four hours and then have a beer and a sausage and a barbecue afterwards. But if you were trying to do that with maintenance, you might get six or seven people show up.”
This problem extends to securing funding from outside sources. “It’s very easy to get funding to build new tracks, but the ongoing maintenance is hard to get,” said Mark Upshall, Operations Manager at the Rotorua Trails Trust. This is a refrain I’ve heard echoed again and again from builders in all corners of the planet.
“Make maintenance sexy.”
The solution, according to Philip Darden, Executive Director of the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association (SORBA), is to “make maintenance sexy.” Each trail group tries to accomplish this goal in different ways, but if you’re looking for inspiration, here are four different strategies that I’ve seen repeated across dozens of top-tier mountain bike destinations.
Strategy 1: Encourage a sense of ownership over a trail
One popular strategy employed by many trail orgs is allowing individuals to sign up as trail stewards of a particular trail. Once a trail has been assigned a steward, that trail is then off the table.
This exclusivity can cause locals to clamor to be the steward of popular trail segments. Riders gain a sense of cachet by being “the” steward of their favorite local tech trail or jump line.
In some destinations, trail orgs post a sign at the top of each trail sharing who the steward is, prompting local businesses to get involved and maintain trails for the “free” on-trail advertising. This strategy is taken directly from the Adopt-a-Highway program.
Having an individual trail steward for each trail taps into the same sense of ownership that has led to rogue trail building’s continued popularity in places like the North Shore. Being known as the trail builder is a badge of pride. If MTB orgs can connect that same sense of pride to trail maintenance, it’s a winning formula.
Strategy 2: Secure ongoing sources of funding to hire staff
One of the most common ways to address the unsexiness of trail maintenance is to secure ongoing sources of funding and funnel those resources into paid trail crews. In many mountain bike destinations, this usually consists of securing a line item in some part of the local tax budget and then hiring staff to take care of the unsexy trail maintenance.
“Through work with the council, we managed to get an amount of ratepayer money on the proviso that the trust, which is a charitable trust, would then seek to use volunteers and seek funding from other sources as a charity, as a nonprofit,” said Upshall. “We get a chunk of money from the council, and we probably get another smaller but still sizable chunk from the community at large itself. We also channel volunteers through the system and get individual donations and memberships to the trust as well.”
Despite securing “ratepayer” money (i.e. tax/utility fee money from the local government), the Rotorua Trails Trust is able to create a budget for ongoing trail maintenance — but it only stretches so far, even in this mega-famous mountain bike destination. Thanks to diligent statistics tracking and accountability through a rigorous trail maintenance database, the Trails Trust has identified that it costs $2 NZD per meter per year to maintain a trail.
Upshall said that there’s always a desire for new trails to be built. “We could get funding to build [a new trail], but then who’s going to maintain it?” The refrain is often, “Volunteers will do it,” but “we generally overstretch volunteers,” said Upshall. That’s why the Trails Trust has three full-time paid staff and contracts additional trail maintenance out when needed.
Strategy 3: Rebuild existing trails to make them better than ever
While perhaps it’s easy for the Rotorua Trails Trust to get permission to build a new trail, in many other parts of the world, that is not the case. In some destinations, the trail inventory is fixed, and getting a new trail approved is very difficult.
In Wellington, New Zealand, the local council has “basically said ‘No new trails on Mount Victoria,’ but what they have said is you can maintain the existing trail, and you can basically modify the existing trail, so long as it stays within the existing trail corridor and it maintains the existing trail grade,” said Baddiley
This permission has allowed the WMBC to take worn-out, tired trails that have fallen into disrepair and, consequently, out of popularity, and completely revamp and revitalize them. What might have once been a rooty, overgrown track that no one used could be turned into a brand-new flow trail filled with berms and jumps, quickly becoming one of the new favorites on the mountain.
In other places, trail orgs will rebuild trails to keep them in line with the latest trends. The Evergreen MTB Alliance recently rebuilt several of the longstanding jump lines at the popular Duthie Hill trail system in Issaquah, Washington.
“We recognize that riding styles have changed, bikes have evolved, and the demand for progression at Duthie has only increased,” said Evergreen. “The Duthie Refresh project provided us with the opportunity to address the need for extra steps in the progression at Duthie by re-imagining the Space Coaster trail.”
Strategy 4: Build new trails so they require less maintenance
Building sustainable trails so that they require less long-term maintenance isn’t a new trend. IMBA kick-started this revolution decades ago — their foundational manual, Trail Solutions: IMBA’s Guide to Building Sweet Singletrack, was published in 2004. Even so, builders are still making changes to their building strategies today to reduce the amount of maintenance that trails will require in the future.
For example, British Columbia’s trails historically featured extensive wooden bridges and technical wooden features… but bridges are extremely expensive to maintain. “Bridges are almost like a standalone feature [and] you have to look at it from a maintenance cost point of view,” said Thomas Schoen, CEO of First Journey Trails in a recent podcast interview. “When we’re talking technical trail features in general, I would say there is a big move away from it, and that’s simply because maintenance is becoming more and more of an issue in all of our trail networks.”
Parting thoughts
Making trail maintenance sexy will always be an uphill battle. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of ripping through fresh dirt on a new line!
While the newest trails will always be glamorous, “we absolutely need to focus on trail maintenance,” said Schoen. Instead of letting the trails from yesteryear fall into disrepair, if we keep our trails well-maintained — and maybe even make them better than ever — our high-quality trail infrastructure will keep our local riding communities healthy and vibrant for years to come.
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