For Reno riders, getting to the trailhead has always meant one thing: “you had to throw your bike on your bike rack and drive, sometimes through afternoon traffic, to get to the trailhead that you wanted to get to,” according to longtime MTB trail advocate Kevin Joell. But a new 100-mile trail stretching along the Sierra Front is set to change that for over half a million local residents.
Joell has been a mountain bike advocate in the Reno/Tahoe area for over 30 years. He served as both president (three years) and trails director (four years) of the Tahoe Area Mountain Bike Association (TAMBA) and as the VP of the Biggest Little Trail Stewardship (BLTS) in Reno for three. Today, Joell is the owner of Sierra Trail Works and spends his time building high-quality singletrack across the region.
Enter the Sierra Front Trail
The idea for a long-distance foothills trail along the Sierra Front, running roughly from Reno to Genoa, emerged around 2014 at the Eastern Sierra Trails Coalition summit. The regular meeting is a gathering of all the regional trail organizations and land managers. In 2014, they gathered around paper maps and sketched out their dreams for trail connectivity along the Carson Range — the last mountain range of the Sierra Nevada before it meets the Great Basin desert. It was at that meeting that Joell coined the name “Sierra Front Trail,” a name that has since appeared in official Forest Service decision memos. The concept wasn’t without precedent: a 2004 Washoe County open space management plan had already sketched a rough “Foothill route” along the foothills, giving advocates an early justification to push the project forward.
While the entire long-distance route is still conceptual, Joell has been spearheading the development of the easiest-to-complete segments of the trail in collaboration with a number of other local orgs, such as Washoe County, the USFS, and the BLTS. Joell has a good estimate and design for the Washoe County portion of the trail, totaling about 65 miles of new singletrack. He envisions the trail easily reaching the town of Genoa and surpassing 100 miles.
And who knows? If they can get some private landowners on board, it could go even farther.
The first sections of the Sierra Front are already built and ready to ride
This 100-mile vision isn’t just a pipedream. Sierra Trail Works has already built the first 10 miles of the Sierra Front Trail. Another nine miles have already been approved and funded, five miles have been approved but not funded, and surveys have been funded for an additional two miles. In total, that makes for 16 miles of trail currently in progress in addition to the completed 10 miles.
The first major section that Joell built is known as the “Belli” segment. The name comes from an old ranching family in the area, but this segment is built on land managed by the Carson Ranger District of the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. This construction was easier to get approved because 14 miles of “mountain bike trails” had been included in a previous decision memo for that area of the forest. The only catch was that the “trails” were actually abandoned forest roads.
“They described it as, ‘Oh, these are going to be really nice, sustainable singletrack, open to all non-motorized users,’ except the map layers that they had accessible to them, to add that to the decision memo at the last minute, was like some old […] closed to the public roads that […] were scheduled for abandonment or decommissioning,” said Joell. “These roads are horrible — just baby head rocks and straight up and down and lots of erosion. And no one’s using them now, right? So it’s obviously not meeting needs and desires.”
Joell met with the Forest Service to see if they could conduct a survey to design sustainable singletrack through the area instead. The USFS was on board, and with their support, he was able to get an RTP grant to fund the trail planning, which was the first time an RTP grant in Nevada had been used for planning and not just construction. Through that process, they were able to design and build nine miles of singletrack that runs close to the roads, but is actually fun to ride. Of those nine miles, about six are the official Sierra Front alignment.
Sierra Trail Works built another three miles of the Sierra Front Trail in 2022, running from the Ballardini Trailhead to Thomas Creek. All of the trail segments currently planned for the Sierra Front provide a classic multi-use style singletrack experience.
New singletrack in the works
The Belli and Ballardini sections are not yet connected, but 13 miles of trail have been approved to link them. Of those 13 miles, the northern half has already been funded for construction, and if it’s not out to bid as of press time, it will be soon.
This 13-mile connection poses some challenges. The trail has to climb substantially in elevation to route up and around private property that extends from the outskirts of Reno into the mountains. “Most people think that the Forest Service starts where the houses stop, and it’s actually almost a mile along that road of multiple private properties before you get to the forest boundary,” said Joell of a particularly sticky section.
Then, the section that hasn’t yet been funded will likely require three bridges to be built. “When we do bridges on Forest Service land, they’re generally over-engineered and over-built, but they last a long time,” said Joell. The county pursued funding to hire a private engineer to do the siting and design of the bridges, so hopefully the bridges will be built and ready for singletrack construction in the near future.
More trails, close to home
“I have a belief that people should be able to recreate from home,” said Joell. “We’re going to connect a lot of these neighborhoods that are currently trail deserts,” giving residents “trailheads or access points where you can then hop right onto singletrack and get out to the National Forest lands.”
That’s the “more trails close to home” movement in a nutshell, and with this long-distance foothill traverse, riders in Reno will now be closer to a singletrack trailhead than ever before.
Know about a new trail project we should cover? Whether you’re breaking ground on the next must-ride destination or putting the finishing touches on a neighborhood flow trail, we want to hear about it. Drop us a line at [email protected] with high-quality photos of your build, plus details like trail mileage, location, difficulty, and what makes it special. We’re always on the hunt for the next great trail story, and there’s a good chance your project could be featured in an upcoming article.
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