“We have a couple hundred people show up every single weekend at the park, and we have a mobile bike shop that shows up at the parking lot,” said Toby Cortez, Development Coordinator for the North Shore Off-Road Bicycling Association (NORBA). “We have a taco truck that shows up every weekend at the park. So the popularity is absolutely going through the roof.”
The mountain bike trail system in question is located in Bogue Chitto State Park near Franklinton, Louisiana, about 1 hour and 30 minutes from downtown New Orleans.
When you roll into the trailhead on the weekend, it feels like a bona fide mountain bike festival. This is intentional — NORBA surrounded the massive parking lot with a slew of fun mountain bike features to play on.
“The trailhead is like a state fair — it’s like an amusement park. And all around the trailhead, we have all of these different rides. We have a jump park all the way from very green to pro-level jumps. That’s called the Sky Ride,” said Cortez. “We’ve got a mountain bike playground that’s called the Lil Bit Balance Bike Course. It’s an asphalt baby pump track. We’ve got a real pump track — it’s called the Mizell Wild Maus. We’ve got a skills park that was recently built by Seth [Gebel]… And then he built a [rideable] replica of the logo of the State Park, which is a roller coaster.
“It’s pretty scenic whenever you come in — you [get] to roll over a hill to see the actual parking lot. And once you see the parking lot, and you see that big roller coaster, you know you’ve reached something special.”
After the first phase of the MTB trails at Bogue Chitto were built, visitation to the state park surged from 75,000 per year to 125,000, and it only continues to grow.
Most trail builders didn’t take NORBA seriously
Bogue Chitto is a sprawling 2,800-acre state park that boasts a respectable vertical drop for this area of Louisiana — about 200 feet. NORBA approached Bogue Chitto with their vision for developing an expansive mountain bike park, and the State Park was immediately on board. Cortez began working on the master plan for the trail system about four years ago, but when he explained his vision for building a sprawling mountain bike trail system in Louisiana, most trail builders didn’t take him seriously.
“‘You want to build mountain bike trails in Louisiana?'” Cortez imitated the responses he got.
“FlowMotion Trail Builders [was] the only company that took me serious,” said Cortez. “He took me serious. He built about eight miles, and since then, we’ve been able to construct a whole bunch of different things.”
20+ miles of trails are available at Bogue Chitto, with more on the way
“The whole premise behind this park, and the design philosophy that we had, was that we want to build it for everybody,” said Cortez. “We did a pretty good job of that. We built it for everybody — [ages] two to 82, all different skill levels.”
In the last four years, NORBA has built over 20 miles of purpose-built mountain bike trails at Bogue Chitto, and another 10 miles are planned over the next two years. The bulk of that trail mileage consists of flowy, machine-built cross-country trails, but in addition, “we’ve actually put in six enduro lines,” said Cortez. “They’re about a little bit over a minute runs each, but they’re just as fun as any enduro lines you get. We hand-imported rocks [and] made rock gardens.”
In addition to rugged enduro lines, there are several flow trail jump lines scatted throughout the park. For riders who really want to test their jumping skills, the Sky Ride jump park at the trailhead is the place to go.
In addition to the baby pump track, the full-sized pump track, and the wooden roller coaster at the trailhead, Seth Gebel of Backyard Trail Builds constructed a skills park that’s “kind of like a Ray’s Indoor Park outdoors, all built out of wood.” Finally, there’s also a dedicated dual slalom course right at the trailhead.
NORBA is focused on high-quality trail construction and minimizing maintenance
NORBA chose to build numerous features in the park out of wood. While some professional trail builders, like Thomas Schoen of First Journey Trails, say that wooden features dramatically increase the need for future maintenance, Cortez says NORBA has taken steps to ensure the features are built to last.
“It is marine grade, specialized wood, commercial wood, that we’re using,” said Cortez. “We’re using things that last 20 years in the water, so it should last out here, and then we’re maintaining those. We’re going to have a spray program and a sealing program and all that stuff to aid that treated wood. But we definitely thought a lot about [maintenance]. I mean, we should get a good 15, 20 years out of that, and that would be definitely worth it, with minimal maintenance.”
Even with the best trail construction techniques, singletrack still requires maintenance — and local riders are stepping up to keep the trails in tip-top shape.
“Any weekend you come to the park, you’ll find somebody volunteering, and that’s the thing that’s made it so successful,” said Cortez. “The NORBA organization and the board of NORBA, all of those folks have done an amazing job of getting the volunteer base activated.”
It takes serious money to get a serious project built
Cortez estimates that they’ve raised about $4 million so far to develop the bike park at Bogue Chitto. These funds covered the trail development, as well as the bathroom facilities and parking lot, which are expensive infrastructure investments.
“Nobody has been left out in the funding process,” said Cortez. Bogue Chitto donors include individuals, corporations, local municipalities, the state of Louisiana, and the federal government.
In addition, Cortez estimates that volunteers have donated about $500,000 of labor to the trail system.
Trails in progress and future plans
NORBA is currently working on a new jump trail with four jumps so far. “We plan on building about 15 jumps on this trail eventually,” said Cortez. “The last jump on that trail is probably a 30-foot humpback or tabletop. They get pretty big.”
In addition to building aggressive lines, NORBA is also constructing an easy, adaptive-friendly trail. “We really didn’t have something spectacular for the adaptive riders, and so I’ve been raising money and working on this plan that we’re about to reveal for about two years of developing a trail that would be fun for everybody, including our adaptive riders,” said Cortez. “We’re actually going to have about a 1.25-mile chip seal trail… that’s going to be absolutely super fun.”
In addition to these stand-out projects, Cortez said that the singletrack network will grow to 30 miles over the next two years as well. Once they hit that 30-mile target, NORBA also plans to build some wide gravel trails and short segments to improve connectivity throughout the network.
It takes a visionary to see a massive mountain bike park where none existed and an incredible work ethic to turn that vision into reality. In Cortez, NORBA has both, and Bogue Chitto is proof of his vision and dedication to making it a reality.
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