This one’s overseen by the county forestry department and had to go through an environmental planning process.īlu Tenbrink of Rock Solid Trail Contracting takes a break on his excavator while building a new trail in the Split Rock Wilds trail system in Lake County, Minnesota, on Aug. Building a modern mountain bike trail is completely different. Some riders hacked new trails through the woods, often illegally. In the early days of mountain biking, cyclists rode on whatever trails they could find - old logging roads, cross-country ski trails, even game trails. The Harjus own a small trail-building company called Dirt Candy Designs in Grand Marais, one of several companies that have popped up in Minnesota and around the country to meet the growing demand for professionally built mountain bike trails that are being constructed nationwide, including this new 21-mile system of trails along the North Shore of Lake Superior. “To let their wheels get off the ground and feel a little bit of that butterfly in the stomach.” “We’re trying to make it approachable for people that like to jump or want to learn how to jump,” Mica said. Harju’s husband, Adam, maneuvered huge rocks with a 3-ton excavator while she did the detailed, finishing work on the 3-foot-wide, hard-packed track designed to follow the contours of the land, swooping and flowing around banked curves, over rocks and through the trees. “This is the real sexy part of trail building,” she said with a laugh. In a remote northern Minnesota forest, Mica Harju uses what looks like an oversized hoe to place dirt and rocks along a new stretch of mountain bike trail carved through the woods.

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