If you build it, will they come? A MTB trail arms race is underway. 

Any opinions expressed in this article belong to the author alone, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Singletracks.com.

All across the United States, communities big and small are turning to mountain bike trail development to generate reliable tourism income and boost their local economies. From tiny, poverty-stricken towns in the Mountain West, where mines have closed, to historic Southeastern metropolises, local politicians see mountain bike trails as one solution to declining tax revenue.

Mountain bike advocates have been successful at making this argument, as a recent report on the economic benefits of mountain biking highlights. This meta-analysis examined 50 different economic studies on the impact of mountain biking on local economies, and some of the numbers are staggering. Mountain bikers visiting the Chequamegon area in Wisconsin spent, on average, $1,107 per trip. Washington state generates $435.7 million per year from mountain biking. And Crankworx Whistler — a week-long event — delivers a $38.5 million USD impact to Canada’s economy.

But attracting mountain bikers and generating tourism revenue isn’t quite as easy as some of these success stories make it seem. Not only that, but I argue below that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for communities to stand out from the pack and for new mountain bike trails to generate lasting tourism dollars.

We’re currently in a mountain bike trail arms race, and even a multi-million-dollar trail investment can’t guarantee that your destination will stand out from the rest.

First, a few caveats

In this article, I focus solely on communities building mountain bike trails to generate tourism revenue and attract potential new residents. I’m leaving aside all discussions about building mountain bike trails for the current residents of a community. While these two goals can easily coexist, the motivations and what success looks like are very different.

I think every community should provide a singletrack trail system to serve its local residents. Every person should have the opportunity to ride a mountain bike if they so choose. This is the ethos behind IMBA’s “More trails close to home” campaign.

Furthermore, I fully encourage local communities to continue building trails and investing in trail infrastructure. The newest bike offering a minuscule technological advancement doesn’t mean shit for the soul of mountain biking. What does transform the sport is the proliferation of more and better places to ride our bikes, which provides more opportunities for riders to form bonds of friendship and share this beautiful sport with the people around them.

So please, keep building trails. But don’t expect a dozen miles of singletrack to turn your hometown into the next Fruita.

Some people will always travel to ride the next new trail

Some mountain bikers will always be willing to travel to ride the next new trail — and I’m one of them. I make this argument based on more than 20 years spent traveling the world with my mountain bike. I’ve ridden somewhere north of 9,000 mountain bike trails and have visited 41 US states, 22 countries, and 4 Canadian provinces. My mountain bike travels have taken me to some of the most famous destinations on the planet and plenty of obscure hole-in-the-wall trails that nobody has ever heard of.

Based on this experience, I don’t think that simply building a new trail system is enough to guarantee tourism revenue.

Are all these new trails successfully generating tourism dollars? An anecdote from Caliente

After reading rave reviews from Tim Wild about the new trails in Caliente and Pioche, Nevada, my wife Christine, my best friend Marcel, and I planned our spring break trip around these two destinations to see what the fuss was all about. Like I said, it doesn’t take much to convince me to check out a new trail, and it was fairly easy to work these two neighboring towns into a lengthier road trip anchored by St. George, Hurricane, and Las Vegas.

We rolled into Caliente (population 971) and were greeted by boarded-up restaurants and literal tumbleweeds rolling down the deserted streets. We poked our heads into the local liquor store for some NA beer and managed to walk out with the one and only choice. As we strolled through “downtown,” we attempted to visit the historic train station, which looked beautifully renovated from the outside — but neither the train station nor the nearby Box Car Museum were open.

As we took to the trails over the next few days, we were both enthralled by how remote and rugged the trails were, especially the upper reaches of the Ella Mountain Trail. But even when we pedaled the close-to-town Barnes Canyon trail system the next day, we again had the entire place to ourselves. While it was a nice change from Colorado trail traffic, it was clear that even some of the town’s most accessible trails receive very few riders.

If desert mountain bike trails don’t receive any traffic over the winter, they exhibit a curious property whereby the trail surface can fluff up and soften into powder. Consistent traffic will keep trails tamped down, but it’s not uncommon to ride in the desert after a seasonal closure lifts and to find yourself slogging through soft dirt, wishing that a few more riders had packed down the trail before you.

Despite riding one of the closest, lowest, and best-constructed trail systems in Caliente (which doesn’t have a seasonal closure), we dropped into several trails — including a spectacular black-diamond descent known as “Wake Up Call”  — that only had a single set of tire tracks running through the soft duff. Wake Up Call is an artistic piece of trail engineering that offers rugged yet rideable features, crafted from massive boulders winched into place to create steep rollers, drops, and berms — all built from locally sourced rock.

Even so, this spectacular masterpiece of a trail only had one set of tire tracks stamped into the surface.

We joked that it must be pretty damn nice to be one of the 20 mountain bikers in Caliente, having all 60 miles of singletrack to themselves. But as the week rolled on, and we noticed the lack of trail use, we revised our estimate down to… 5? Maybe less? It seemed like Barnes Canyon would be the place to ride all winter long, and even there, the trails still needed to be packed down in late March.

While Tim shared exciting quotes from local trail advocates in his article, in the conclusion, he noted, “A small rural town like this doesn’t always have enough local riders, builders, or advocates to keep their trails in the spotlight, but that’s a shame.” All too true.

Having few local riders is one thing, but what about tourists?

While it’s fair to say that this nearly abandoned town might not have many local riders, it doesn’t seem like it’s successfully attracting much in the way of MTB tourism, either. Sure, we saw a couple of bikes on the back of one other van in the campground at Kershaw-Ryan State Park, but compared to the swarms of riders that descend on the nearby trails of St. George, Hurricane, and Las Vegas every spring, Caliente was downright deserted.

Above and beyond mountain bikers, we saw very few other adventure tourists out camping, either. The tiny 16-site campground at Kershaw-Ryan didn’t even fill up on the weekend, and we didn’t see any folks camped in the few dispersed campsites we passed.

While Caliente might have built 60-some miles of high-quality singletrack, including an epic (albeit quite aerobic) backcountry point-to-point shuttle run, I’m not convinced that the trails have yet generated the tourism revenue that the community may have hoped for.

It will take a lot more effort to stand out from the crowd of other mountain bike destinations that are also building new trails

It’s great to see local communities across the nation building trails. I applaud their efforts, and I hope to ride them all someday!

But here’s the crux of my argument: If seemingly every little town is investing in mountain bike trails in an attempt to generate tourism revenue, the bar for standing out from the crowd has been raised dramatically.

10 to 15 years ago, when many of these trail projects were probably first getting started, being one of the few towns with a mountain bike trail system could set you apart from the other small towns in Utah, Nevada, British Columbia, et al.

But now, if almost every single town has a mountain bike trail, it’s going to take more than a small trail system with ho-hum singletrack to motivate riders to visit your community.

Most mountain bikers only take 2-5 trips per year

According to statistics gathered by Singletracks, on average, mountain bikers take two trips a year, and most of the trips are 2-3 nights long. Data collected by the Journal of Vacation Marketing in 2019 is more optimistic: they state that mountain bikers take five trips per year, on average.

Whether two or five trips, it would do professional mountain bike journalists, trail builders, and trail advocates well to remember that the average rider doesn’t get to travel nearly as much as we do. With just a couple of trips per year, riders need to be choosy about where they go. The stakes are high: if you choose to spend your annual week-long mountain bike trip on a destination that most people have never heard of, it could be a flop. The trails might not be all that good.

If you only get one or two chances to have an epic mountain bike trip every year, do you really want to risk it on a “maybe”? Do you really want to go to Caliente instead of Hurricane and St. George, when you know that Hurricane has spectacular trails? Not only that, if you want to scratch the itch to ride new trails, it’s easy to find a destination like St. George where you can pair long-time classics like Zen with brand-new trail developments like Cliffrose and Revenant.

How many trails — or how high a quality of trails — are required to attract mountain bikers to your town?

This is the question of the hour: just how many miles of trails do you need to attract mountain bikers to visit your town and spend their hard-earned dollars there? Of course, it’s not a one-to-one formula, where the most miles gets the most riders — trail quality and renown also play a role. Manicured jump trails in a region that doesn’t have any, or steep, technical, visually stunning lines, can easily attract riders despite a relatively small overall trail system mileage.

Still, the question remains: what will it take to stand out from the crowd? In the MTB trails arms race, how many “arms” must you have in order to win the tourism dollars?

If you think the arms race metaphor is overblown, consider that roughly 15 or so years ago, the iconic destinations of Fruita and Moab were engaged in a literal race to see who could build the most miles of singletrack every year. While Moab was the OG mountain bike destination, Fruita came onto the scene with spectacular singletrack at a time when most of Moab’s iconic rides were either slickrock slabs or 4×4 roads. So Moab tried to play catch-up by building more modern singletrack routes and trail systems.

Not willing to be passed up, Fruita and the rest of the Grand Valley engaged in a trail building frenzy as well, with both Moab and Fruita laying down 10-15 miles of singletrack per year for several years in a row, in the days before multi-million dollar budgets and massive professional trail crews.

If it can happen there, I think it can happen anywhere and everywhere. In fact, I think it’s already happening.

The modern mountain bike trail arms race: Arkansas versus Colorado and Utah

While the competition between Fruita and Moab has mellowed, the current mountain bike trails arms race in the USA is being pushed by the state of Arkansas. Arkansas began by building trails to take advantage of its incredible natural terrain, with the Walton Foundation investing millions in Northwest Arkansas to attract and retain talented employees.

But they didn’t stop there.

Bentonville went on to proclaim itself the “Mountain Biking Capital of the World,” and ongoing investments, including a lift-served bike park, indicate they’re still working to establish that claim beyond any reasonable doubt.

In recent years, the Waltons and Arkansas as a whole have moved their sights up by taking aim at one of the largest outdoor recreation economies in the nation: Colorado. In 2023, Tom Walton said, “I really think Arkansas has the potential to be the equivalent or better than Colorado [in] 10 years’ time in terms of owning the outdoor rec experience.”

First Gentleman Bryan Sanders, who leads a council to promote outdoor tourism in the state, agreed and has been pushing to make that happen in the years since. At the February 2025 Arkansas Governor’s Conference on Tourism and the Arkansas Outdoor Economy Summit, Sanders said that “Arkansas has the same opportunity around mountain biking and cycling [as Colorado and Utah.”

“You can ride year-round here, and when you see people from Colorado driving to Arkansas to ride in winter, you know we’re onto something special.”

The moral of the story: A million dollars and 10-20 miles of singletrack won’t cut it anymore

It’s unclear how many tens of millions (or hundreds of millions?) of dollars have been invested into Arkansas’s mountain bike trail system. But the moral of the story from Arkansas’s ascendant rise is clear: in 2025, it takes more than a million dollars and 10-20 miles of merely average trails to set a town apart from the masses.

There’s never been a better time to be a mountain biker — but if you’re a city councilor or a county board member, you need to be honest with yourself and realize that it’s going to take more than a few miles of singletrack to get mountain bike tourists to visit your town.

If you want to bring millions of tourism dollars into your local community, it’s still possible, but you have to make a splash. Instead of thinking small, like putting 5-10 miles of singletrack in a city park, you have to think big. Take your cues from places like Bentonville, or the Baileys Trail System in Athens, OH, where they’re building the “longest contiguous MTB-optimized trail system east of the Mississippi River” with 80-some miles of singletrack.

It’s still possible to win the mountain bike tourism game with a grand vision and top-tier trail construction… but it’s harder than ever before.