B.C. is poised to get North America’s first year-round mountain bike park complete with a gondola-style lift to give riders a steeper downhill slope.
The Sunshine Coast development team includes mountain bike stunt riders, filmmakers and trail builders. Building the Coast Gravity Park (CGP) also has a touch of celebrity buzz because the development team includes B.C. mountain biking icons Kyle Norbraten, Curtis Robinson and Dylan Dunkerton.
That trio is collectively known as the Coastal Crew – stuntriders who produce movies such as Arrival, expected to be released on iTunes later this month.
The group has so far built 10 sections of trail in the brush on a 150-acre site near Sechelt, on which it has purchased an option to buy from longtime owner Ray Stockwell.
They are now beating those bushes for cash.
A month-long crowdsourcing campaign aims to raise $100,000 to demonstrate public demand. The campaign ends November 8 and urges interested mountain bikers to buy advance day-passes to provide initial capital and to convince bigger investors that the park will be viable, group spokesman Jeff James told Business in Vancouver.
The gondola could cost up to $5 million to build and it would rise 250 metres to a summit.
James said the group’s tentative plan is to expand the trail network on the site to more than one kilometre and be accessible to riders of varying competencies.
Evidence that there is demand for such a park is clear from strong demand for mountain bike trails at ski resorts across B.C. during the summer.
Whistler Blackcomb Holdings Inc. (TSX:WB) sells lift tickets to more than 100,000 mountain bikers during its season, which starts in the spring and this year ran until October 14.
“We are the No. 1 downhill mountain bike resort in the world ranked by the number of visits,” Whistler Blackcomb CEO David Brownlie told BIV.
He would love to extend the season but said that it is not possible because of a raft of different maintenance tasks and inspections that the company needs to carry out on the resort’s lifts to get them ready for ski season, which is likely to start in mid-November.
“Some of the best mountain bike riding is right now as the temperature cools down, the ground is moist and the wheels can grip better,” Brownlie said.
James agreed and said that this is what will be a major selling point for the CGP, which is at sea level and will be comparatively warm in the winter. All other North American mountain bike parks with lifts are connected to ski resorts, he said.
B.C.’s second most popular mountain bike park, Silver Star, sold 25,000 lift tickets to mountain bikers this year, general manager Michael Sherwood told BIV.
Sun Peaks Resort, Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, Panorama Mountain Village and Fernie Alpine Resort are B.C.’s other ski resorts that cater to mountain bikers in the summer, said Martin Littlejohn, who is executive director of the Western Canadian Mountain Bike Tourism Association.
A separate category of mountain bike park is the dirt bike parks across Metro Vancouver that do not have the elevation necessary for the higher-speed riding that can be found at ski hills, Littlejohn said.
“These dirt bike parks can have advanced level jumps and are popular,” he added before explaining that one is in the brush just west of the south end of Burrard Bridge. It has jumps, which are sculpted with a clay so riders can speed up and get airborne before coming down on an end ramp.
Similar parks are:
•underneath and just west of the Ironworkers Memorial (Second Narrows) Bridge in North Vancouver;
•off InterRiver Park Road in North Vancouver near Capilano College; and
•off Barnett Highway near Burnaby Mountain in Burnaby.
“Mountain bike parks at ski hills don’t have the mandatory gaps that are at the dirt parks,” Littlejohn said. “The ski hill parks have what are called tabletops where the gap is filled in. So, if you land short, you just end up on the flat part and don’t have an accident.” •
