In my town, it’s a familiar story. A few kids show up at a city park with shovels, start digging, and before long there’s a little line of jumps tucked into a corner somewhere. Eventually someone notices the holes, the kids get in trouble, and the jumps get flattened. A few weeks later, the cycle starts over on a different patch of dirt.
The Selwyn District Council in New Zealand was dealing with the same thing. But rather than playing whack-a-mole with young trail builders, the council decided to try something different: give the kids their own dirt.
“We noticed that kids were digging up dirt in their local parks to create bike jumps and in the process they often destroyed the vegetation,” Kieran Wall, Reserves Operations Manager at the Selwyn District Council, said in a council news release. “Some councilors suggested we provide them with some dirt to build ramps and the idea has been a big success.”
How the self-build bike jump idea works
The council’s Parks and Reserves team launched the pilot project during the previous school holidays, dropping off council-supplied dirt at three parks in the townships of Leeston, Lincoln, and Tai Tapu. From there, the kids take over the design and construction.
The team also put up signs encouraging young riders to get creative, along with a QR code that riders and their parents can scan to share feedback and ideas through a short survey. “The more feedback we have from the community, the more informed we can be about the trial,” Wall said.
The jumps have been popular enough that the council planned to deliver more dirt ahead of the upcoming school holidays so kids can build bigger and better features. This time, the delivery includes clay, “which is better soil to build jumps,” according to Wall. Anyone who has tried to shape a lip out of loose topsoil knows exactly why that matters.
Ten-year-old Fletcher Ramsell of Lincoln is one of the local riders who has been putting the dirt to good use, and he says he can’t wait for the clay to arrive because it’s easier to shape. “It’s quite fun, and we get to do more jumps, so we can practice doing our jumps,” he said.
Better than another lap at the pump track
Fletcher’s dad, Brandon Ramsell, lives near Rosemerryn Reserve in Lincoln, where his son and friends regularly ride the pump track along with the new jumps.
“You can go around the pump track only so many times before it gets a bit repetitive, so having the dirt to create jumps has been terrific,” Ramsell said in a news release from the council. “They all have different skill levels, but you can see the boys egging each other on to make bigger jumps.”
Lincoln councilor Denise Carrick pointed out that the program is simple and inexpensive, and it gets a lot of use. She said it’s great to see young people “doing what kids should do – playing in the dirt and being creative.”
Coming to more Selwyn parks
According to Wall, the pilot has gone well enough that the team is adding a new site at Foster Park in Rolleston, and the council is considering expanding the trial to West Melton and other townships in the district. Council staff are working with local councilors to identify additional locations, though Wall noted that the kids have their own way of letting the council know where dirt is needed.
“Kids communicate in their own way that they need some dirt, when they start digging up the reserves to build their own jumps,” he said.
Mountain bikers gonna dig
During the 2020 lockdowns, a group of mostly pre-teen and teenage kids piled up some dirt beside a creek in a city park near me, and it wasn’t uncommon to see 20 or more riders of all ages taking turns on the makeshift course on a Saturday. More recently, I wrote about a local park where an anonymous dad’s homemade wooden ramps inspired neighborhood kids to start sculpting their own gap jumps and berms.
Clearly, if there’s dirt and a little bit of space, kids will find a way to build something to ride. However, safety concerns and damage to the natural environment are often cited as reasons to crack down on kid-built trails.
What I love about the Selwyn District Council’s approach is that it doesn’t try to turn the kids’ creativity into a formal, professionally built bike park. A pile of dirt, a few signs, and a feedback survey cost far less, and the kids get to build it themselves, which is often just as fun as riding. The vegetation in the rest of the park gets left alone, and the land manager gets real data on how much the jumps are used.
Here’s to hoping the trial is a success and we see this concept take off in communities around the world!
Hat tip: iBikeRide
The news stinks. Why not follow Singletracks on Google News to bring more joy to your day?
0 Comments