Northwoods Trail should open by spring
An International Mountain Biking Association official says the first section of the Northwoods Trail Project should be open to the public “sometime in the spring” of 2018.
Rich Edwards, a construction manager with IMBA’s Trail Solutions group, said it is devising a plan to create the project’s first trailhead for public access. He said the first mile of trail, which is projected to be constructed by Christmas Day, is not connected to any adjacent trails.
The trail is slated to be built in a 2,000-acre tract of unspoiled woodlands the city owns north and west of Park Avenue. The construction of Phase One, which has a budget of $1.3 million, will include the installation of 14.7 to 16.6 miles of trail and is expected to be completed by the fall 2018.
The trail project, which got its go-ahead after receiving a matching grant of $648,421 from the Walton Family Foundation in October, had a projected start date of Nov. 13. Visit Hot Springs CEO Steve Arrison said the trail’s construction team is currently in the process of finalizing the project’s details before construction.
Arrison said the final cost and timeline of the trail were tough to determine immediately after a meeting on Nov. 2, as Trail Solutions had not yet observed the land.
“They’re out looking, determining soil,” he said. “They’re getting ready to start construction, but they have to determine where they’ve got to stage all of their equipment from, talk to the city about how to get access to certain places and just get the lay of the land before they can start.”
Edwards said Trail Solutions will begin with the first mile and then extend out to Cedar Glades Trail to create a trailhead that would give the public access to the completed portion of the trail.
Edwards also said Trail Solutions is looking at the possibility of building a trailhead near lakes Sanderson, Dillon and Bethel.
“We’ve started a trail that can connect either way, so we’re starting in the middle and working toward Cedar Glades,” he said. “As we bring in more teams, then we’re gonna start tackling the stuff more through the water works.”
As for the construction itself, Visit Hot Springs, the city of Hot Springs and IMBA officials all attested to the challenge that the tough Ouachita Mountain terrain will bring. Edwards said the terrain will allow Trail Solutions to construct a wide variety of trail elements, but will also wear on its tools.
Edwards said the team charged with the first mile’s construction will document the challenges for the two to three teams that are slated to begin construction in 2018. He said each team will be put together based specifically on “their mix of skills, talents, riding styles and equipment.”
“There’s always some site-specific or regional-specific challenges,” Edwards said. “That’s just part of the job, and that’s part of the reason folks ask us to do this stuff.”
“They’ve built trails in Arkansas before,” Arrison said.
Edwards said that, once completed, the Northwoods Trail System will contain sections of trail that will have “a primitive back country feel, as well as stuff that provides more of a bike park-roller coaster kind of feel to it.”
“The objective is to provide a lot of trail diversity within those miles so that irregardless of what type of biker the person is or what part of the country they come from, they’re gonna find something that they can identify with and feels like home, and at the same time, experience a bunch of stuff that they may not have seen before,” he said.