Mountain Bike Update

As many of you know Giants Ridge was impacted by a strong rain event on 6/18/24.  This storm had a significant impact on our trail system.  Our trail maintenance crew (plus extra mountain staff) is working hard to get the bike park back up and running, but we have a long road ahead of us.  We have also reached out to numerous regional trail contractors to help us rebuild and re-open our trails.  Here is an update of where we are at, and what we expect for the next few weeks.

Bike Park Operations Update:

The Giants Ridge Bike Park will be closed 6/29 and 6/30.  At this time, it is our goal to re-open July 5^th-7^th.   We anticipate having 3 or 4 Down Hill trails that weekend.  We will have special lift ticket rates of $5 per day.

Downhill trail status: 

Every single one of our downhill trails sustained damage that would prevent it from opening.  Generally speaking the damage becomes more severe at lower elevations because the water was gathering both volume and velocity.  Also, our trails on the south side of the mountain seemed to get more water from this storm than areas to the north.

Our (temporarily expanded) in house crew is currently working on repairing Ribbit 1 and 2 as well as Tadpole.  When they have finished with those trails, the will work on Techonite and Return to Send’ er. Our focus is on these trails, as they are the trails we can re-open the quickest.  Once they complete this work they will move to Leapfrog next.

Matt T. with Elemental Industries is now on site and will be doing some work on the lower section of Leapfrog, and also working on the lower section of Sector 12.  Sector 12 sustained the most damage of any of the Down Hill trails, and will take weeks of work (likely from multiple sources) to rebuild/re-open.  We are thankful that Matt was able to come so quickly to help us out.  Unfortunately, like most trail builders, he has a narrow window of availability so we are trying to focus the time he has on the areas where he can have the largest impact.

We are also working with several other trail builders who have windows of availability.  We aren’t expecting to see any other builders until after the 4^th of July Holiday.  Once we get those crews on site, we will have more updates about where they are working and the progress they make.  Re-opening the remainder of our trails will be a slow and ongoing process throughout the remainder of the summer.

XC MTB Trails: 

Our North Mountain Bike trails in the Enchanted Flowest survived the storm with minimal damage.  Those trails have now been re-opened.  Please note that some of those trails need a good weed whacking, however this week we have all of our available labor dedicated to repair trails damaged by storms, so the weed trimming has been put on hold at the moment.

Unfortunately, our South XC trails all sustained significant damage and are now impassible.  Re-opening of these trails will be dependent upon getting a professional contractor to repair them.

XC Ski Trails:

The trail damage wasn’t limited to just the Mountain bike trails.  The Bronze, Oslo, and Biwabik Spur all sustained significant damage from this storm as well.  We are also working with a local contractor to repair these trails.

GRIND MTB Race status:

This week I checked out the Short GRIND course, and we believe that whole Short course will be good to go in August!  However due to the Damage to some of our XC ski trails and the south XC single track trails the status of the normal Long course remains “To Be Determined”.  That said we fortunately have about a month and a half before the event, so we will continue to look at what parts of the course are viable and what parts are not.

We would like to thank everyone for their patience as we work through this challenging storm.  We are all bummed about the level of damage we received, but if there is one thing we are all too aware of, it is that Mother Nature always has the final say.  On the bright side we are committed to rebuilding and re-opening our trails and providing the best bike park experience we can!

Thank you for being a part of the Giants Ridge community.

Benji Neff

Director of Mountain Sports