Community & Business
6 February, 2025
Million dollar makeover for mountain bike park
OVER a million dollars has been secured by Tableland Cycle Sports to refurbish the mountain bike trails in Atherton after many were damaged following Cyclone Jasper.
Received through the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements, the funding will be used to repair, refurbish, and make more resilient to future rain events, the intermediate difficulty trails at the Atherton Forest Mountain Bike Park.
Following each wet season, the group carry out extensive maintenance to tidy up the trail network, but after the Cyclone Jasper rain event, the park was shut for four months with no one able to access it.
“After we finally were able to go back up the trails, everything was washed away and eroded, especially the blue (intermediate difficulty) trails that go up the hills,” Tableland Cycle Sports president David Prete said.
“We have picked up some money along the way. We received $100,000 from the Gambling Community Fund soon after Jasper to do some refurbishing and then $50,000 from the Queensland Rural and Industry Development Authority to do some repair work.
“After exhausting those funds, the Disaster Recovery Fund became available.”
However, one part of the track has not yet been reopened due to a 1.6km landslide wiping it out, with that one section estimated to be a $50,000 fix.
Mr Prete also said that out of the 60km of trails at the park, 46km will be refurbished.
“All 46km of our blue trails have been targeted for this funding because we can maintain our green (easy difficulty) trails relatively easy,” he said.
“But our blue trails are more technically challenging to fix because they’re further out and harder to get to.”
The repair and refurbishing of the trails is set to begin after the wet season, and given the size of the grant, these works will be carried out by a professional crew under the guidance of a project manager.
The trails will be made more resilient by hardening sections of the track through rock armouring and rock matting and implementing causeways and bridges if need be.
The works will also only be done on the trails in sections to avoid affecting the use of the park by mountain bikers.
“Our first step in refurbishing these trails is to appoint a project manager, and then we’ll call for tenders to refurbish trail by trail,” Mr Prete said.
“We anticipate that it will be a professional trail construction crew carrying out this work.”
“We also have a full-time trail care crew who will work with the professionals and we’ll only close off a trail that we’re working on, so it doesn’t affect the use of the park.
“We hope to have everything completed, in an ideal world, by July-November,” he said.
The group received the maximum amount of $1 million through the grant, as well as an additional $100,000 in contingency funding only to be used if any trail costs “blow out” and to fund a project manager.
“It was a fairly comprehensive application process, we definitely had to jump through some hoops,” Mr Prete said.
“But we’ve got a really good relationship with Parks, the council, traditional owners and our Sport and Rec support personnel in Cairns, so by tapping into all those resources we were able to write a pretty solid application.
“Whilst it was a bit of work to do, it paid off in the end and we’re very happy with the results.”
“It’s really good that we picked up this $1 million to refurbish our trails and make them more resilient,” he said.
