Following more than a decade of planning, and seven years after the first trail was built, the trails at Naneum Ridge — located about 30 minutes outside the small college town of Ellensburg, Washington — are finally official. At least, they will be on May 16. That’s when the trails at Naneum Ridge — also known as the Cookie Cutter Trail System — will get their long-overdue grand opening ceremony.
“There’s so much work that’s gone into this, and to finally get it recognized and get signage up there too […] is going to be huge,” Jesse Cunningham, Kittitas Program Manager for Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance told Singletracks.
Grants were off the table, so the chapter worked to raise funds and stakeholders got creative
Naneum Ridge State Forest is managed by the Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR). In 2015, with input from various recreation groups that included members of the Kittitas Chapter of the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance, the Naneum Ridge to Columbia River Recreation Access Plan was published, outlining a 10-15 year development plan. There was just one hitch: There was no funding available to support the plan or to build any of the trails.
Actually, there was another hitch. There’s no permanent public access to the Naneum Ridge site. Surrounding private property owners granted the Washington DNR management easements into the area, but “because there’s no permanent public access, they could not access publicly available funds through grants, which allow us to do some of the work that we do in Washington, particularly with the state agencies,” Cunningham said. Without this important source of funds, the club would need to get creative.
“We said to DNR, we’re motivated to do this. If you’re willing to work with us on it, we will self-fund this, and we’ll have volunteers, and we’ll fundraise, and we’ll make it happen.”
So the club got to work on fundraising. By 2019, enough funds had been raised to build the first trail, Basalt Flow.
“In 2022 we had another chunk of time where we had an excavator up there and we built some jump lines and kind of a small skills area,” Cunningham said. “And then we ran out of time and money at that point, but we scratched in a line. Literally the last day that we had the excavator up there, our excavator operator said, ‘Well, I can just take a quick run down this trail.'”
An expert-level jump line, the Basalt Assault trail required too much work for volunteers to complete it by hand. After sitting unfinished for nearly four years, this year the club finally managed to secure an excavator to complete the work in hopes of having the trail ready to ride in time for the official grand opening this weekend.
Support from the DNR helped keep the project moving
While local mountain bike advocates were working to bring the Naneum trail system to life, the Washington DNR was working on infrastructure improvements as well. The department completed various improvements to roads in the area, and installed a pit toilet. And crews from the Washington Youth Conservation Corps, along with fire crews off deployment, were made available to help with trail work and maintenance.
The Cookie Cutter trail network is anything but, with more than 1,500 feet of vert
The Washington DNR gives each timber sale in the state a unique name for reference, and “Cookie Cutter” was the name of one such sale in the Naneum Ridge area. Though the timber sale occurred years ago, the DNR chose the name for the trail system.
With the grand opening of the Cookie Cutter Trail System, a press release from the Evergreen Mountain Bike Alliance promises “12 new singletrack trails, totaling about 14 miles, along with a new skills area featuring seven short trails.” The main trailhead area provides access to the green-rated Basalt Flow loop and Ellensburg Blue. A small skills park is sited at the trailhead as well.
The Cooke-Coleman Crest trail connects the trailhead to trails located farther up the mountain. All told, riders will find more than 1,500 feet of elevation gain between the bottom and the top of the trail network.
Of the dozen or so trails currently open for riding at the Cookie Cutter trail network, five of them are machine-built. The rest were built by hand. Though the trails are primarily designed for mountain biking, they are also open to hiking. Many of the trails are directional, in part to avoid potential user conflict.
Electric mountain bikes are prohibited on non-motorized trails in DNR-managed areas, so e-bikes are not allowed at Naneum Ridge.
Cunningham says the area has a “wilderness, backcountry feel to it” and is “close to one of the biggest elk herd populations in the state.” Dispersed camping is allowed within parts of Naneum Ridge State Forest, so riders could easily make a weekend out of their visit.
More trails and improvements are underway
Though this is the grand opening for the Cookie Cutter trails, the trail project is technically still in its third phase. Work is ongoing to rework the Ellensburg Blue trail and once that’s complete, builders will move to finish Hustler, a jump line located higher in the network. “Then the next priority after that is to finish [the] XC loop,” also located higher up the mountain, Cunningham told me. Still, funding to complete the project is tight.
“If we had the resources, we could build all of that this year or next year,” Cunningham said. “I don’t know if that will actually happen. I think we’re gonna run out of the available money that we have right now.” As a result, fundraising efforts are ongoing.
Throughout the yearslong process, Cunningham says some within the community questioned why he was so fixated on the Naneum Ridge project. “I was like, ‘I have this long-term vision, and I think that we can get there, but it may take a while.’,” he said.
“And obviously it has.”
The grand opening for the Cookie Cutter Trail System will take place at the main trailhead on Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 10am.
0 Comments