Club makes bike trail deal

When Stewart Bryan was approached by Newland Communities about building a mountain bike trail at the company's emerging Briar Chapel development south of Chapel Hill, he wasn't sure what officials wanted his bike club, the Triangle Off-Road Cyclists, to do.

Did they want an extensive trail network for the exclusive use of Briar Chapel residents? If so, he could point them in the direction of a competent commercial contractor. If it was a smaller trail system just for residents, then TORC's volunteers could build it -- for a substantial fee.

Or did Newland intend to open the network to the public, in which case TORC would be happy to build the trail?

At his first meeting with the developer, it turned out the company's representatives were asking the same questions.

"They really weren't sure what they wanted," said Bryan, who becomes the year-and-a-half-old club's president in January.

But they did know enough to contact Bryan for advice on this offbeat amenity for their development, which eventually will be a self-contained mini-city with 2,389 homes in Chatham County. Instead of building around a golf course, Newland wanted to offer a variety of trails, including a mountain bike network.

"Initially," Bryan said, "they had in mind a limited area contained in powerline easement, basically an out-and-back trail" of about three miles.

"But the more we talked, the more they realized they wanted a real trail system. They just didn't know what that meant."

Bryan walked the Briar Chapel land with the developers and outlined the possibilities. Then he took company officials out to the seven-mile mountain bike network at Little River Regional Park on the Orange/Durham line. That network was designed and built by Bryan's old club, the Durham Orange Mountain Biking Organization. DOMBO was formed to build Little River, which opened in 2004; not long after, the club folded into TORC, a new, umbrella mountain bike club for the entire Triangle.

Newland officials quickly agreed that the three-mile network they initially contemplated wasn't nearly enough. TORC kept pushing and proposing; Newland, in Bryan's words, kept saying, "Sure, why not?"

While walking the property with Newland officials, Bryan mentioned that the rolling terrain would require a fair amount of bench cutting. That is, to minimize erosion on steep slopes and keep the trail surface flat -- and not pitch downhill -- the volunteer builders would need to slice into the hillside, a labor-intensive procedure if done by hand with shovel and pickax. At Little River, he noted, the club rented a mini-skid steer, a Bobcat-like machine that cuts shelf trail in a fraction of the time.

It was then that Newland officials showed just how interested they were in a mountain bike trail: They handed TORC a check for $25,000 to buy the machine.

"We've had other grants in the $3,000 to $5,000 range," says outgoing TORC President Bill Camp, "but never anything of that magnitude."

Despite the sizable contribution to TORC, the resulting trail will still be a bargain for Newland. The trail will be built with all volunteer labor from TORC; a similar commercial trail would probably cost about $100,000, figures Camp.

Newland has barely begun work on the development, which will take seven to 10 years to complete. But last weekend, TORC, with 38 volunteers, and a professional trail building crew in town from the International Mountain Bicycling Association, flagged about two miles of trail and cleared about half of that. Workdays are planned throughout the winter.

Ultimately, Newland and TORC hope to have 20 miles of singletrack snaking through the development. Bryan is reluctant to speculate on how soon the first section of trail might be ready to ride; that, he says, is more dependent upon when Newland gets some roads built at the site.

"By late spring or early summer we'll have a decent amount to ride," says Bryan. Look for the first trailhead to be off U.S. 15/501 near the intersection with Jack Bennett Road, north of Fearrington Village.

As for what kind of riding to expect, Bryan compares the terrain to that at nearby Big Woods, a vernal trail network open only for a month around the Super Bowl. Expect a mix of beginner, intermediate and advanced terrain.

"There'll be good variety," promises Bryan.