Stoke for spokes: Community celebrates the grand opening of the Eagle Bike Park

From the initial ask to the shovels in the ground, the Eagle Bike Park has been a labor of love for the local biking community. On Friday, May 31 — just in time for summer break — the new amenity opened in Eagle.

With a skills zone as well as jump lines full of ladder drops, cannons, step-up boxes, hip jumps, kickers, a wall ride and other features, the park is designed for all kinds of bikers from beginners to experts working to master their craft.

Bringing the park to life

The initial vision for the Eagle Bike Park came from the Mountain Recreation Haymaker Trailhead Master Plan, which was completed in 2020. In this process, “trails and bike amenities were the number one priority,” said Ernest Saeger, the executive director of Vail Valley Mountain Trails Alliance.

This need and desire for a bike park was validated in 2022 when the town of Eagle underwent the planning process for its Open Space and Trails Master Plan.

Seeing this demand for a bike park at the Haymaker Trailhead in Eagle, Vail Valley Mountain Trails Alliance decided to run with it, driving the project up until its opening last week, Saeger said.

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VVMTA was involved in the creation of the Minturn Bike Park, but from the beginning, the organization knew the Eagle amenity would bring something different.

“That being the first bike park in Eagle County, we built that to accommodate the masses and create a little bit of the middle ground,” Saeger said. “For Eagle, we didn’t want to build another Minturn Bike Park. We wanted to look at what is not in Minturn and create that here in Eagle so our community has an option of whatever it is they’re looking for.”

Through learning from the Minturn Bike Park and stakeholder engagement in Eagle, a design for the bike park came together.

The park was primarily designed by Avon resident Tim Halbakken, who works for IMBA Trail Solutions and who helped design the Minturn Bike Park. Pedro Campos and Zehren Associates also helped with planning layout, movement and landscaping.

It was something that took “a lot of partnerships, a lot of planning, a lot of input, a lot of help and support from people in our community,” Saeger said.

“We didn’t go out there and just build what we thought was desired out there. We wanted to build what the community wanted out there,” he added.

A big part of the need VVMTA and the project planners saw was something to encourage learning and progression in biking as beginner mountain biking terrain can be hard to come by in Eagle County.

“Haymaker is the beginner terrain in our county and our community, and Haymaker connects this bike park. So the idea is you can go into the bike park and try to learn a little bit,” Saeger said.

“In Eagle, on any given day before the bike park, if you went out to Haymaker Trailhead in the summer and you saw all the camps and kids and groups out there meeting in the mornings during the week, it was incredible. It was super cool, but it was super busy, and they were all kind of fighting for the same space and the opportunity to where they could go use and recreate. So we saw that crowd and that group as a demand and a need,” Saeger added.

As such, the park has features designed to learn biking skills and progress those skills as well as prepare for the surrounding trail systems. The skills area includes features you’ll find on Haymaker from the log roll to the ending berms.

“That connection there is just super, super cool to be able to have that bike park and then just go right out to the trail when you feel comfortable getting on the trail,” Saeger said.

That said, the park also builds up to larger and larger features so there is room for growth and improvement. Built into this is flexibility so the bike park can continue to accommodate community needs in the future, Saeger said.

“We’ll just watch and learn,” he added.

The grand opening

Construction began on the project in the fall of 2023, led by Sam Chipkin, VVMTA’s trail operations manager, and was completed with the help of many volunteers including the organization’s trail conservation crew.

“We were working up to the last minute to get it ready to open. We were very much considering not opening on Friday because we knew it was going to be a really hard push, but we wanted and needed to get this open to our community,” Saeger said.

In the month and a half leading into the opening, volunteers logged over 500 hours helping get the park open.

“Volunteers were just showing up in the middle of the day, after work or when they had a lunch break helping get this bike park open,” Saeger said.

Seeing the park finally filled with bikers last Friday was “surreal,” Saeger said.

From the minute the first bikers hit the park, it was all smiles, laughs and hooting and hollering, he added.

“It was much more of a response and attendance than I had ever imagined, and it’s only continued over the weekend and into this week already,” Saeger said.

Bringing this vision to life has “been a huge community partnership project of multiple different funding sources and support,” Saeger said.

The town of Eagle provided the initial $200,000 seed money and land, with Mountain Recreation contributing an additional $45,000. From there, VVMTA raised over $175,000 from individual donors, families, friends and local businesses. A $100,000 grant from Great Outdoors Colorado in March helped push them over the finish line.

In addition to financial support, over $100,000 of in-kind materials and services from the local community was poured into bringing the vision to life.

From those who provided feedback to the volunteers and donors, the community support for the bike park “shows the invested interest of our community to have this and to really take that ownership and stewardship of it to make sure that it’s something nice that we all can enjoy,” Saeger said.

At the end of the day, it’s this enjoyment and connection to the outdoors that is central to all the work VVMTA does, he added.

“We do our work because we want to encourage our community to get out there, use our trails and use recreation as something for their quality of life, for their physical and mental health, for their enjoyment of where we live and the access that we have right here to these amazing amenities in our backyard,” Saeger said.

“We also want to have these things and teach our community how to maintain these and be stewards of them, to make sure that we have them for all of us to use year over year and for the many generations to come.”