Does anybody know the status of the Mazeppa Park trails?   

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I realize it's not a Trailblazer project but was looking to see if anybody has any insider info.

Really close to the Lake Norman Brewery🙌

The Cycle Path wrote on 09/16/16 at 4:53pm:


so back to my original question... any idea of a timeline?

Yesterday, I rode the new Cub Creek trails in Wilkesboro, which were also just built by Jim Horton. After riding that trail, it is what I imagine Mazeppa Park will be like. Smooth, flowy trail with not many roots, bermed turns everywhere and overall just a lot of fun! Not sure what experience level Mazeppa will be geared towards, but Cub Creek is a "beginner" trail. Maybe we'll get a few more technical stuff here.

For those who do venture up to Wilkesboro, I would recommend checking out Cub Creek. Its pretty convenient to get to off of 421 and would be a good warmup before heading to Kerr Scott.

Don't read any kind of snarky attitude into my question, but how does it cost $125,000 to build a 6 mile trail? I'm guessing that perhaps this is based on hiring trailbuilders from out of town like the IMBA affiliate who have to charge for long term living expenses and bringing in eqmt? Or is it the environmental impact study? 

I'm just wondering if we've established a new norm for mtn bike trails that requires them to be machine built and manicured. Granted, a county park is not likely to want an RRT-style trail, but the WWC trails seem to be successful and immensely popular without the IMBA machine built paradigm.

I think of the IMBA rebuild of Keyauee at Uwharrie (Wood Run). Make no mistake...I love Keyauee now, just as I did before. But I've thought many times how much more mileage might have been built out there by spending that same amount of money (as the Keyauee remake) on additional traditional natural trails. I wonder if the state and local governments may be more open to having trails built on public land if they weren't faced with having to fund over $20,000 per mile to build them.

I'm sure some of you out there can educate me on what I'm missing about all this. Thanks.

Cherokee:
    About 53K of the Keyauwee expense was for the archeological study. More was rolled into the environmental study. This was before the first bucket of dirt was moved. There were re routes because of archeological sites. 

Cherokee wrote on 11/08/16 at 3:04am:

You also have to take into consideration time to design and build trail only using volunteer labor.  Mazzeppa Road Park had a grant applied for it by the Town of Mooresville.  The club will take over duties of maintenance and repair when it's finished.  As far as Uwharrie, the redo of Keyawee would have taking 4 times as long or longer to redo by hand.

It usually takes about 6-7 months to hand build/bench cut about 2 miles of trail.  I can rough in a mile of trail in 3 weeks with a machine and hand finish work usually a months worth of Saturdays/Sundays.  $4-$8 per linear foot is spot on for estimates.

When we had Bob Karriker build Laurel and Wildlife, he did it at a reduced rate of $1 per foot.  He used the club's machines, took out his own insurance policy and we paid him as a contractor.  That was paid for with a $75K RTP grant.

I, like you, feel that trail building has become a little too homogenized in certain cases and like to machine build as well as hand build.  It really depends on what kind of experience you're looking to design/build.

Machine building is also a more predictable quanta, as well.  With volunteers you never know who will or won't show up to work so it can be unpredictable especially when dealing with deadlines like we did with LNSP.

MtnJax wrote on 11/13/16 at 2:29pm:

I think the majority of it will be built by the trail builder.  The club will take over maintenance after that.  We will post up as soon as we know! 

MtnJax wrote on 01/19/17 at 2:13pm:


Here is something that turned up on the town of Mooresville website (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)

The town was awarded ~$100,000 of grant funds through the State of NC's RTP grant program.  According to the article the funds were supposed to be available in March of 2016 for construction...  As of now no turned has been turned to my knowledge.

I have heard that the state's RTP grant program has fallen behind due to under-staffing in the trails department.  This may be delaying the availability of the funds.  The town is managing the construction of the project so they would be a bit more knowledgeable of the exact schedule that trail construction is now on.

Thanks for the education guys! This thread has been extremely insightful..