Mammoth Cave National Park isn’t the Yosemite Valley of national treasures. For most people, it’s not even the Mt. Shasta, even though the 390-mile subterranean system is the largest known cave network on the planet and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, too.

Midwesterners come to visit the cave, which is outside Bowling Green, Kentucky, maybe camp for the night, then leave. They rarely paddle or fish on the Nolin and Green rivers that gently course through the park; most of the half-million or so annual visitors don’t even know that Mammoth Cave covers about the same acreage as more widely celebrated Acadia National Park in Maine or Arches in Utah.

“People come for the caves and they barely even know there’s a park on the surface,” say Mike Dulin, a rep for the local chapter of the International Mountain Bike Association, KYMBA.

Not only is there a park on the surface, it’s a national park, and it’s about to become the first national park with real singletrack open to mountain bikes.

BECAUSE OF MAMMOTH’S UNIQUE SITUATION, a national park with only locals using the surface (and under-utilizing it at that), mountain bikes were actually allowed in with a semi-official capacity on a few trails starting in 1999. The trails traced the routes of old road beds, which sidestepped the sea of red tape that would otherwise be required to let bikes in. (To date only two national parks allow bikes, Saguaro and Golden Gate. And even there it’s on asphalt or pathways, not singletrack.)

All great. But everything could have gone sideways from there. This is Kentucky, major horse country.

Once the bikes were let onto the trails, Bowling Green League of Bicyclists (BGLOB) mobilized an army of volunteers to reengineer the trails for better flow, water management, and durability. Park managers noticed the work mountain bikers were putting in and even the local hiking groups paid attention. The crown jewel of the BGLOB effort (and, later, KYMBA) became the Sal Hollow trail — which park managers actually closed to horse traffic in 2004 because bikers and hikers complained about the destruction horses were causing.

That’s where things started to go awry.

Local horse enthusiasts took note, founded the Mammoth Cave Equine Trail Riders Association and began petitioning the park to reopen Sal Hollow to horses. But they also began to show up for trail work days, and the horse folks, the mountain bikers, and the hikers started seeing more of each other — and started seeing eye to eye, rather than hairy eyeball to hairy eyeball.

This was right about the time the park was reassessing its users, spending, and future trail use. After park managers submitted several plans, the big user groups got together and hashed out what they wanted. “We realized that if we fought each other we’d all get screwed,” says Dulin, bluntly. “So we all agreed that we’d find a way to push through the votes for the most ambitious option. We shook on it. I grew up in New Jersey, where they’re a bunch of shysters. In Kentucky their word is their word.”

What every user group agreed to was to designate trails for mountain biking and hiking and other trails for equestrians. The park’s managers wanted better parking, litter control, more camping — and peace among the natives.

Half a decade later, and mountain bikers are about to lose access to Sal Hollow — and get the country’s first national park mountain bike singletrack in return.

An 8- to 10-mile trail on the park’s northeast boundary is up for public comment now, but all user groups seem to be in agreement on it: Mountain bikers will give up access to Sal Hollow, which will cede back to a horse trail, and in exchange they’ll get their own new trail, which is tentatively called Big Hollow. And not only that, but there’s potential for dozens of additional miles of singletrack in the remote, northeast section of the park.

It’s also worth noting that at a time of national budgetary crisis the approximately $1 million plan was achieved entirely through citizen-action groups raising “friends of the park” funds privately. This truly isn’t “your tax dollars at work,” but friends of Mammoth Cave dedicating parts of their busy lives to make their park stronger.

Jenn Dice, government affairs director for IMBA, says that Mammoth Cave managers want their trail to be seen as model for how mountain bike trails can work in national parks and “that’s what we want, too. We want other park managers to go there, to show them how this works, to show them what a trail built to the highest standards looks like and to say, ‘We can do this for your park. This is how we get kids and families out of their cars and using more of what you have to offer.’ ”

Speaking of which, Dice says that there are at least 10 other national parks weighing mountain bike-oriented trail construction, though given the political sensitivity, she was mum on which parks. One that is already going forward with 20 miles of virgin singletrack this summer is New River Gorge in West Virginia. IMBA will coordinate the custom-construction by hundreds of volunteers from the Boy Scouts of America.

Photo by Leslie Kehmeier; a section of singletrack at New River National Park.

This environmental coverage made possible in part by support from Patagonia. For information on Patagonia and its environmental efforts, visit www.patagonia.com.

Tagged as: mountain bike, mountain biking, national park, national parks