Dirt Lab: Creating a Grassroots Skills Park and Trail Building Playground
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 14 December 2020
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mat Stanke is a trail builder and board member of the Clinch Valley Trail Alliance in Oak Ridge, Tennessee outside of Knoxville. He and his club recently opened a new skills park called the Dirt Lab through a grassroots effort involving local businesses and community members.
We talk about the vision behind creating the Dirt Lab bike park and how it differs from the natural singletrack trails that were already available to riders in the area. Mat walks us through approvals, funding, and construction, offering insight into the process for others who might be considering the same for their local community. More than just a place for riders to progress their skills, the Dirt Lab offers builders an opportunity to hone their trail feature building skills for future projects as well.
Tune in to hear about the mistakes the group made along the way as Mat speaks candidly about some of the challenges the project faced.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:52.3 | Hey, everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. My name is Jeff, and today my |
| 0:57.3 | guest is Matt Stanky. So Matt is a trail builder and board member of the Clinch Valley Trail |
| 1:03.9 | Alliance in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just outside Knoxville. He and his club recently opened a new |
| 1:10.1 | skills park called the Dirt Lab through a |
| 1:13.0 | grassroots effort involving local businesses and community members. Thanks for joining us, Matt. |
| 1:18.6 | Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. So tell us a little bit about the Clinch Valley Trail Alliance. |
| 1:24.1 | How is the group formed and what's sort of your mission? So our group is formed kind of out |
| 1:30.0 | of necessity and serendipity. Right next door in Knoxville, we have the AMBC, which is a very, very active, |
| 1:38.6 | very successful organization. But they've got a real strong focus on the downtown downhill and urban wilderness |
| 1:48.0 | projects in Knoxville and the surrounding area. And Oakridge has growing opportunities with the |
| 1:54.4 | Department of Energy hand land back to the city and trying to manage it and build trails. And we really needed a focused group of people |
| 2:02.2 | to work on these opportunities so that you're not distracted by one or the other and they get |
| 2:07.7 | full attention from a group of people. Yeah. So a few of us came together from the local area and |
| 2:13.8 | started this thing. So far, it's been pretty successful. |
| 2:17.6 | Yeah. |
... |
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