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Northwest Trail Alliance Reinvigorates Off-Road Riding

By Tom Archer, President, Northwest Trail Alliance

In the past year, citizens, bicycle shop workers, and government land managers have remarked that they haven’t seen this much excitement for off-road bicycle advocacy in the Portland, Ore., region in years, if ever. Helping shape the new push is the Northwest Trail Alliance, a 20-year-old organization that, in the past year, changed its name from Portland United Mountain Pedalers (PUMP), participated in a major rebranding effort, and expanded its board to 12 members in order to implement the vast skills and considerable energy of regional enthusiasts.

Photo courtesy of NW Trail Alliance

The ST240, a singletrack trail building machine.

Much of this increased energy has come from an effort to improve singletrack opportunities in Portland’s vast city greenspace, Forest Park, a 5,000-acre undeveloped area just blocks from downtown. While the park has abundant hiking opportunities, relatively few of the trails are open to bicycles. Northwest Trail Alliance has helped lead the charge to push for more bicycle access. This year they placed three people on a committee convened by the City of Portland to study the issue and make recommendations to the Parks Department. The effort has been hard fought, and a resolution may be months, or even years away. In the meantime, the Alliance has been working to build, maintain and secure access to trails in a half-dozen other spots in Oregon and Washington, ranging from Mount St. Helens National Monument, to BLM land near Sandy, Ore., to private timberland.

Key to the Northwest Trail Alliance’s renewal has been its conversion from a stand-alone organization of locals to a formal chapter of the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA), the world’s premier off-trail cycling advocacy organization. The group was one of five IMBA affiliate organizations to convert to an IMBA chapter under a new pilot program, leveraging IMBA’s name recognition (among both the public and government entities), marketing experience and capacity, and membership fulfillment capabilities. Small all-volunteer groups often don’t have the capacity to quickly and efficiently handle all of the administrative duties that come with a growing organization. Almost immediately, the change has paid dividends as IMBA is helping grow membership, contribute time and resources to local projects, and has developed a regional leadership council for the Pacific Northwest, which will provide additional resources and expertise to NWTA and other groups throughout the region.

Additionally, NWTA has been able to leverage its newfound energies to raise $30,000 from local and regional sponsors, a collection of businesses ranging from brewers to bike shops, all in the service of mountain bike advocacy. The funds will be used for membership development, further increasing the organization’s effectiveness and outreach, and most importantly, for trail construction and maintenance.

The most visible of riding milestones in the Portland area has been the 2010 opening of five miles of brand new singletrack on forested BLM land near Sandy, Ore. The trail was designed and built by IMBA under contract to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. Northwest Trail Alliance has entered into a formal arrangement with the BLM to maintain the trail, which is “purpose-built” for mountain bikes and includes bermed turns, doubles and an emphasis on flow. Efforts to develop an additional 10 miles of singletrack are well underway and portions could open during the summer. Already, the trails are some of the most heavily used in the area. This is just the tip of the iceberg for the Alliance. Trail building projects are in the works for Gateway Green, a multi-use bike park that will incorporate singletrack trails, a skills park, and gravity features, and L.L. Stub Stewart State Park, Oregon’s newest state park.

Illustrating its newfound effectiveness of working with agencies and owners of all sorts, this past spring the organization inked an historic agreement with Oregon State Parks to design, build and maintain new trails specifically for mountain biking “Stub.” It is the first time the state agency has allowed such an opportunity to a private user group. Not only does the agreement afford for more off-road cycling opportunities in the park, 31 miles west of Portland, but the document itself should serve as a template for other similar arrangements. It becomes a mechanism that can be used to approach other land managers, both public and private, to secure similar trail building opportunities. The fact that the agreement has been vetted by the State of Oregon’s Attorney General’s Office should give other potential partners a lot of confidence from a liability standpoint.

The Northwest Trail Alliance will develop these trails with work parties by its enthusiastic members (there’s one nearly every weekend on regional trails) and hopefully with a brand new ST240 singletrack building machine. The device, which resembles a miniature backhoe, is designed specifically to fabricate trail, and will vastly improve trail building speed and capacity. NWTA has applied for a grant from the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department to cover the majority of the $94,000 machine, which, if procured, will be available to nearly any local entity interested in constructing trails. It’s one more way to develop new partnerships in order to increase off-road riding opportunities.

Perhaps the best testament to the renewed enthusiasm within the community is the examples of two local mountain bike shops, Fat Tire Farm and Bike N Hike. This spring the shops’ owners each decided to pay one of their employees to work at L.L. Stub Stewart State Park, Black Rock, and Sandy Ridge, building trails. Park Chambers, owner of Fat Tire Farm, summed it up this way, “It seems like mountain biking in the region is at a tipping point, and hopefully efforts like this can help push it along.”