Trail Mix Trail Coordinator Jeff Van Horn had already put in 100 hours worth of planning and scouting before crews finally broke ground on the new mountain bike trails in Dead Horse Point State Park. To someone accustomed to working with shovels and rock bars, it wasn’t much like trail work, he said.

Now that he’s out on the ground, watching trail emerge between flags, Van Horn is feeling more satisfied. “It’s going to be a great trail in the end,” he said.

It’s also going to be culturally and biologically sensitive, with its alignment dictated as much by archeologists and biologists as mountain bikers. That’s why the process has taken so long, and why Van Horn believes this trail could help answer questions about trail impacts. While most other trails have only been studied after the installation, this route will be tracked from the start.

“This one will have studies for big horn sheep calving, and it will have studies for impact on spotted owl nesting,” Van Horn said. He noted that raptors abound along the rim, which forced the trail back from the edge. “There’s a peregrine aviary here; for close to a hundred years there’s been a nesting pair. There’s a pair of goldens up here also. They’re gorgeous.”

He hopes the trail won’t impact their habitat. “Hopefully, this will help with the biology on how we interact, or fail to interact,” Van Horn said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we don’t want to mess up the spotted owl.”

Utah State Parks Southeast Region Manager Tim Smith said the nature of the trail made it adaptable. The route is a tour of the landscape rather than a ride to a destination. “If there were archeological sites, we could move it,” Smith said. “If we had to go back from the rim, we could do that. If we had to go to one arch or one mountain peak, it would have been tougher.”

The push for a trail began with the park’s most recent resource management plan, where mountain bike trails were originally endorsed. For Smith, it fits into his compact version of the state park’s mission: “To have folks come up to their state park and have a great day out, that’s what we’re all about,” he said.

Smith has also talked to local mountain bike outfitters, who’ve told him there are few places to send beginner mountain bikers in the Moab area. A common set of trail criteria for visitors seeking information at local shops includes singletrack trail in a park that the whole family can ride. Currently, that doesn’t exist.

“Our goal was to have a nice, easy-level trail that a lot of folks could do in a pretty spot, and all of Dead Horse Point is pretty,” Smith said. “State parks is more about that than an extreme, black-diamond niche, and we were real excited to see that what was lacking in Moab was easy mountain biking that’s in a park, that’s non-motorized.”

The only place Smith wasn’t hearing about the need for mountain bike trails was in Dead Horse Point’s own surveys. “In a counter-intuitive way that has me somewhat excited because we know mountain bikers are coming to Moab, but they’re not going to Dead Horse Point,” he said. “The weakest element of our visitor’s survey is the folks that aren’t coming.”

Dead Horse Point State Park is a big draw; it pulls its weight in gate receipts, with nearly 200,000 annual visitors paying $10 per car to get in. Attracting a whole new group to the park could help the bottom line. “We have to pay the bills through our entrance fees to a certain extent,” Smith said.

However, he said revenue enhancement isn’t the main goal of the new trail. “We can make more money by raising fees. That doesn’t get me as excited as bringing in new constituencies, people who will stand up and support state parks if needed. If nobody comes, we’re not meeting our mission.”

The first part of the trail will begin at the visitor’s center, and it will parallel the current hiking trail. After about a mile, Van Horn said most of the casual hikers have turned back, so the trail isn’t so crowded. At that point the bike trail will be a shared route which uses some of the current hiking trail’s alignment.

The initial loop, which will be complete this fall, will be about a five-mile loop, and ultimately it will lead out to a 14-mile loop. In addition to the other routing challenges, much of the area is sandy, which doesn’t make for a good riding surface. While the rim is rock, that’s where raptor disturbances are a big concern.

“We don’t want an out and back, particularly along the rim, but to get back from there we can’t put people on the road, because there’s no shoulder. So what we’re going to have to do is go across some sections that we know are sandy,” State Parks Trails and Pathways Coordinator John Knudson said.

Knudson has worked with Trail Mix on a number of projects, including the Colorado River pedestrian bridge, and he recently coordinated the loan of an enclosed tool trailer to Trail Mix. He said the tools and trailer will be used on the Dead Horse Point trail project.

Knudson already has a $40,000 budget for the Dead Horse Point trails, but he fears he may have to find more funding for some type of hardening treatment on the sandy sections.

He said he talked about techniques and costs with representatives of the International Mountain Bike Association’s Summit in Park City last week. “I found out we probably need a bunch more money,” Knudson said. “For any of those treatments, I’m trying to find some extra dollars.”

The hardening could include flagstone, tree resin tilled into the sand, magnesium chloride or wood chips. While that is still up in the air, Knudson got some extra incentive to pull out all the stops at the IMBA Summit. “The governor, when he welcomed the International Mountain Bike Association Summit folks here up in Park City, he said in his address that he was looking forward to riding this trail,” he said. “No pressure there.”

American Conservation Experience, a non-profit organization that coordinates volunteer conservation projects, performed much of the work on the first phase of the project early in June. Knudson said he’s bringing in more volunteers in coming weeks, then crews will return to complete the first portion of the trail in September and October.

“I’m having a small crew from Utah Conservation Crew in Logan that will work three or four days,” he said, adding that he welcomes other volunteer input through the summer. “In between, if Trail Mix and the Moab Trails Alliance want to help where they can, I think we’ll be fine.”