Several years after getting a gnarly downhill trail and a pump track, the Arcata Community Forest may be getting another bicycle-focused amenity after a high school team pitched it to the city. 

The city may fund a bicycle “skills trail,” where mountain bikers can practice difficult techniques on terrain not common to Humboldt. Trails may include a “rock garden” (a path choked with stones, hard to quickly ride), a steep climbing trail, and logs to descend on. The proposed site is located at the top of the Jump and Peanut Butter mountain biking trails, about an acre in size. 

The idea came from the Humboldt Composite, a county-wide mountain biking team made up of riders from the 6th-12th grades. Most of their races take place outside the county, where rocky trails and difficult-to-traverse obstacles are the norm. There aren’t many places like that to train here, so they thought it’d be a good idea to reach out to the city to see if they’d be interested. They were, and though it’s not a sure thing yet (Emily Sinkhorn, Arcata’s director of environmental services, said it would need to be approved by the Forest Management Committee and the city council), everyone’s excited about the possibilities. 

According to Brenda O’Dell, a coach for the Humboldt Composite, many of the jumps in the forest are too aggressive for many of their riders. A skills park would be a nice way to get their athletes acclimated to the trickier details of controlling a bicycle at-speed.

“It’s a good way of supporting the kids and getting them outside and active,” said O’Dell. “I’m an ER nurse, and I see a lot of kids that are struggling, and I’m like ‘You need to get outside, and get some exercise!’ It just helps build a community that fills a niche for some kids.”