November 14, 2023
Have you heard of West Mountain? If not, you’ve almost certainly seen it from a distance. This rugged and remote area lies just North of Highway 91, about 30 minutes west of St. George. Today it’s wild and empty. Soon, it’ll be home to a new trail network unlike any other in Southwest Utah.
Here’s what TASU President Kevin Chrispoherson has to say about the project:
“Several years ago, we sort of polled our community, if you will, and sort of informally and formally, it’s like, what do people want? And what we heard didn’t really surprise me.
What people wanted were things on the extremes. And I think we have a lot of cross-country trails that are kind of kind of intermediate. I heard that people wanted more beginner trails, green trails, and I heard people want more downhill trails and and black trails.
For the last several years we’ve been moving that way. And since that time we’ve added added kind of a beginner loop out there at More Cowbell. And then we helped with the construction of the trails out through Desert Canyons.
But what we haven’t had is the downhill trails and the really expert downhill trails. We’ve got kind of slow tech, but not really the downhill stuff. And so we’ve been kind of working towards that. And it’s hard here because we don’t have a lot of mountains around here if we want something close.
So we’ve been working on that for you know, we started looking at West Mountain really pretty hard in 2017. And that kind of serves two purposes. One is it gets us to a higher elevation.
So it extends the biking season locally close. You don’t have to drive all the way to Brian Head or somewhere if you don’t want to. And it gives us that elevation drop that provides that other option for trails.
And it’s not really a bike park, but there are some of the same kinds of features that you would see in a bike park.
Our motivation was to create a downhill trail that everybody could ride. It’d be kind of, you know, have some A-B lines where, you know, the experts have a line on some features and beginners or intermediates have a ride-around kind of thing.
Thank you again to all who commented on our posts as well as provided comments to the Environmental Assessment. The final EA will approve over 20 miles of trail. Phase one will be 10-12 miles with a 6-mile expert DH line, and 5-6 miles of all levels of jump/flow lines etc. It will be like nothing else we have here.”
