ST. LOUIS — About 100 volunteers descended on Carondelet Park on Saturday to build the first single-track mountain bike trail in St. Louis.
They spent hours scraping away at the earth with special hoes and axes to form a pair of slightly tilted linked loops.
“It’s a process,” said Dan Koehr of Fenton, who hacked at the dirt with a heavy, long-toothed hoe called a McLeod. “You cut it. You clear it. You build it.”
Koehr got addicted to “bombing down” trails during the pandemic, when mountain biking — already in the middle of a resurgence — took off. A team of young cyclists, the South City Otters, formed in 2020 with two dozen kids in middle and high school. They’ve since doubled in size.
But city riders like the Otters have few choices other than commuting to St. Louis County or beyond, where parks have been installing mountain-biking trails for the past several years.
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Ryan Hanlon, a veteran trail builder, lives in the Holly Hills neighborhood of south St. Louis that borders the park. He saw potential in an overgrown section in the park’s northwest quadrant.
“It was my catalyst to dig in and get this done,” Hanlon said.
Two years ago, he started enlisting support, approaching the park’s advisory board, his alderwoman and the Gateway Off-Road Cyclists, a nonprofit that designs, builds and maintains trails across the region.
It wasn’t a hard sell.
“This is the kind of thing the city needs,” said Anne Schweitzer, the alderwoman of Ward 1, who rolled up her sleeves Saturday. “It puts Carondelet Park on the map in a cool new way.”
Once the approvals came through, the first step was “healing the woods,” Hanlon said. DJM Ecological Services, a Wentzville landscaping and consulting firm, donated its services, clearing years of overgrowth of wintercreeper, grapevine and honeysuckle.
Then Gateway Off-Road Cyclists scheduled the build, a many-hands-make-light-work undertaking. Grass was shoveled away, soil was smoothed, and dirt that had been scooped into old cat litter buckets was dumped out to form berms.
“It’s one little inch at a time,” said Enrique Von Rohr of the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood. “It feels like we’re a bunch of ants.”
Von Rohr was pulled into the cycling world by his son, a student at Metro Academic and Classical High School and a member of its mountain biking team. Von Rohr is one of the Panthers’ coaches.
“It’s growing all over Missouri,” he said.
Saturday’s labor would conclude with a ready-to-ride path of just over half a mile. It’s a fraction of the more robust offerings in the suburbs, but a perfect beginner’s challenge, said Hanlon, the project coordinator. Another ring of about the same size is slated to be built in the fall.
August Montroy, a sophomore on Metro High School’s mountain bike team, chipped away on a section with several of his teammates, grateful to have a place to practice closer to his home.
“I like the trails at Cliff Cave,” he said of the south St. Louis County destination. “But now I can bike to where I’m going to bike.”