Full Article: Burnaby bike skills park nearing completion Jay Hoots, the designer of Burnaby’s new bike skills park on Burnaby Mountain, checks the progress of construction. The park is scheduled to open in the spring. Some Burnaby residents are in for a rough ride. The Barnet bike skills park is nearing completion, with opening expected in spring. Designers of the park, who worked with the City of Burnaby, promise a facility that will set a new standard for bike skills parks. “I don’t think there’s one like it anywhere in the world,” said Jay Hoots, contracted by the city to design the park. “Everyone has come together to make this park awesome.” The park has some of the latest features for bike skill parks, including dirt and wood pump tracks. A pump track is a series of loops, berms and rollers built around a small track. Once a cyclist picks up speed riding through the course, they can sustain their own momentum through it. Another feature of the park came from the Burnaby Mountain Bike Association. The group, long-time Burnaby Mountain trail users, wanted the park to include trail features. “We’ve managed to do it,” said Hoots, one of the premier cycling park designers in Canada. “We’ve managed to incorporate a North Shore-style downhill trail on one side and we’re working on developing an uphill technical trail on the other side. “So the park will be a gigantic loop.” Designing the park wasn’t as simple as moving dirt, logs and rocks around. Because it’s located on the side slope of a mountain—where the former Barnet gun ranges used to be—they had to deal with erosion and drainage. “We’ve managed to develop a fairly comprehensive water management strategy,” said Hoots. “Once the site is completed, we’ll come back and look at using aggregate to supplement that.” “What’s been first and foremost on everyone’s minds is how do we make this park sustainable?” Located across Barnet Highway from Barnet Marine Park, it was started last year. The site, used for several decades as a gun range, had to be remediated before it could be improved. One justification for building the park is liability issues. The city has problems with some mountain bikers illegally building trails and stunts—ladders, teeter-totters and jumps—on Burnaby Mountain and in other wooded areas. When city staff learn of these apparatuses, they tear them down because they’re considered unsafe. But to satisfy the needs of bikers, Burnaby decided to build its own skills park where they could construct structures meeting proper standards. Thought was also put into making the park more than just a destination for the “hardcore” mountain bikers. “This is a fantastic opportunity to allow other members of the community, who wouldn’t normally come out to a bike park, to actually use a facility they wouldn’t normally see,” said Hoots.