This year, in August, a new-age bike park opened in Norway. In a city above the Arctic Circle – Harstad. With a wide variety of MTB trails and numerous activity options for riders at the bottom of the hill, this place has captured a lot of bike riders’ hearts.
Visitors to the Harstad bike park can choose from a variety of riding experiences. Two pump tracks, a freestyle park, and skill parks are all part of the arena area. The hillside of the bike park is covered with uphill and downhill trails entailing various levels of difficulty. This means it’s suitable for a wide audience: families with children, beginners, regular riders, and professional riders, who most definitely will appreciate the adrenalin-filled black jumpline and black enduro line. Not to mention the amazing freestyle park.
The Hastad Bike Park consists of two parts: the arena area (lower part of the hillside) and the hill that is covered by the MTB trails. The arena area was built on the site of football fields, but it now houses a variety of activity zones, including:
The hill is relatively small and not rocky like the ordinary Norwegian hills. It’s covered by northern birches, which give good shade in the summertime but, in the fall, create the beautiful yellow autumn landscape.
MTB trails are classified according to their type (uphill or downhill) and difficulty level (green, blue, red, or black). All trails are connected at the trailhead, which features picnic tables. It’s planned to have a BBQ house with a viewpoint tower and a platform that would work as a protective shield from rain.
ย MTB trails are designed to be pretty close together, sometimes even crossing each other with wooden features. Trails have been designed as carefully as possible in accordance with nature, respecting the scenery that was already foreseen in the project.
The competence of the head shapers is crucial in the construction of the trail itself; in fact, it is the work of a craftsman, because after the mechanized equipment creates the base layer of the trail, it is finished manually, with hand tools such as a shovel, a rake, a plate compactor, and other specific tools. In addition, the participation of volunteers who performed simple tasks was a great support for this project. It is expected that in the future volunteers will help the municipality maintain the trail, which is a very important task, because the maintenance of such trails must be done regularly, a little every day, but at the beginning of the season there is a lot of maintenance. After the completion of the trail, the designers provide the customer with recommendations for maintaining the trail.
Although the trails have only recently been completed, the municipality already has plans for future development, because it understands that this area of recreation is popular and that diversity and the continuous introduction of new things are necessary, especially in the bicycle industry, where there are innovations every year. The same design team is already designing a much larger mountain bike trail on a larger adjacent mountain, connecting it to the already established bike park.
This example from Norway shows that impressive MTB trails can be made on relatively small hills.
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