Knoxville

The local mountain bike club won a $100,000 grant from Bell Helmet to build some more mountain bike trails in Knoxville. Mostly a downhill course.

Check out the links:

Local News Story

Campagin link

Cool, huh?

I'd much rather they built separate trails for those bikers who want to go fast and hard instead of letting them onto hiking trails. Hiking trails are fine for the bikers who want to take it easy, but I'd rather not get run over by the extreme folks! Nor, I presume, do the extreme folks want to run into me!

Congratulations to the bike club for winning the grant!

I am greatly in favor of new trails built by the community of mountain bikers expressly for mountain bike use. That's not a bad thing at all, as long as the trails aren't sources of erosion or degradation of the environment.

Many trails for hiking and equestrian use were built in whole or in part by volunteers from the hiking and equestrian communities and these communities still contribute time and effort toward their continued maintenance. Seems like a good opportunity for mountain bikers to develop a similar feeling of trail ownership and stewardship.

Nice!!!

Would've loved that back when I rode.

The campaign was very well done. I shed a bit of a tear for Shaggy myself, but alls well that ends well!

I think the grant is for mountain bikers only trail. I sympathize your concern because i'm both a hiker and a mountain biker. Many of the trails in this area of Knoxville is multi-used and I always give hikers, trail runners, and horse riders the right a way. Unfortunately, there always a couple bikers that gives the rest a bad name and to balance this out, there always a couple hikers and equestrian users that give their own group a bad name. Me? I try to find the middle ground. I love to hike amazing trails and I love to ride bikes on amazing trails. I want to preserve and maintain trails for all users without destroying ecosystem, and shutting out other users access to the trails and the wilderness. It getting harder and harder in our society as the population grows. Maybe I can learn from people and help us all find that middle ground when it come to multi-use trails. I don't work on trail days for hikers since I help build and maintain trails for cross-country mountain bikers. When I see hikers working on hiking only trails, I shake their hands!

The real problems caused by bikers is almost nil. Horses do more damage to trails than both hikers or bikers combined, but rain does most of the damage by far and the trail itself is the cause of that. You can't even blame the damage done on the rain.

The point is, bikers have had to fight for their right to use trails and I fought hard with them for many years. For the most part there has never been any good reason to ban them in most of the places where that's happened.

There is obviously a balance between use and preservation, but use and access are vital. The real balance lies in maintenance. That necessarily comes with use. It kind of irks me when I see tax paid Park District employees wearing immaculately cleaned and pressed new suits while driving $40,000 brand new and always shiny trucks complaining about having to do some real work cleaning up after people. I don't excuse those who make the messes, but we pay to keep things up, and we pay a lot.

I'm impressed with the City of Knoxville for getting involved with this. Good for them!!!