A new 33-mile mountain bike trail will eventually go around Payette Lake just north of McCall, Idaho. The Central Idaho Mountain Bike Association (CIMBA) announced that it has gotten approval to build a mainly natural surface loop around the lake on state land. CIMBA is partnering with Trail Solutions, the trail-building arm of the International Mountain Bicycling Association to construct the project in phases.
The partners have not completely figured out the timetable — but it will take years. CIMBA received all the necessary permits, one major hurdle. But the second perennial one remains: receiving all the necessary cash. “Trail building is expensive and CIMBA is now actively seeking grant money and private donations to fund the construction of this community trail. The timeline for construction is entirely dependent on our ability to mobilize our community and foster partners in completing this trail for the benefit of every mountain biker in McCall and beyond,” the organization said in a press release.
CIMBA does “not have an exact price estimate for the entire trail or an average price per mile at this time. We have an evaluation scheduled with Trail Solutions for this spring when the snow melts, at which time they will analyze the flagged route and provide us with a detailed estimate for Phase One construction costs,” CIMBA public relations official Maxfield Silverson wrote in an email.
CIMBA has applied for various national and local grants. CIMBA “will continue to seek out and pursue any relevant grant funding to complete the trail. In terms of donations we will be launching a Go Fund Me (or similar crowdsourcing platform) campaign and approaching individual benefactors who have expressed interest in funding trail work in the past. We may pursue corporate sponsorships as well as we are not ruling out any source of fundraising that will contribute to the completion of the trail at this point,” Silverson wrote.
But the partners plan to start construction this summer and the trail will open in stages. They first plan to build four or five miles on the southern edge near North Beach, connecting with Payette Rim Trail and the McCall town connector and from there, the singletrack at Ponderosa State Park.
CIMBA says it expects a trail with intermediate trail difficulty.
