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Grande Prairie
In April TCD was contacted by a newly formed mountain bike club in Grande Prairie who were interested in converting their local ski hill, Nite Hawk, into a mountain bike park. TCD happily did what we could to help. First we flew into Grande Prairie to take a stroll around the site and meet the dudes responsible from the bike club and the ski hill. Two things that we noticed right away were the capability of Nite Hawk’s terrain to become an attractive mountain bike destination and that the ski hill was very interested in transforming a winter operation into a full season operation.

The deal was sealed - TCD was going to Grande Prairie! Plane tickets were booked, a trailer was borrowed, sabbaticals were taken and we were off. Nite Hawk’s bike park was under way, and with over 500 feet of vertical, the most in Alberta (lift accessed), there was going to be a load of work ahead for TCD and crew.



The spring went fast, too fast, and so did the early summer, but right in front of our eyes, the park went from concept to reality and was ready to open. After 13 weeks of racking up frequent flyer kilometres, countless empty propane tanks, who knows how many frozen burgers, a bag of used golf balls, 3 broken picks, 1 broken Pulaski and over 1500 hours of recorded volunteer time, the citizens of Grande Prairie had a freshly completed mountain bike park to ride. Nite Hawk started out with an easy green trail, a blue run through the trees, a skills park, and a week or so later the black run was finished and raced on.


During the construction phase at Nite Hawk, many brains were put together. And not everyday city brains. These were hard working dude brains that are used to making do with what little you have. Out of this northern brain trust, ideas turned to reality in a hurry. The first issue was the retaining walls. Without substantial rock or an easily accessed or cheap lumber source, TCD was left to scavenge the diamond mine of a junk yard that old ski hills so often have. The solution: steel pipe, insulated and bare steel. Originally donated years ago for snowmaking lines, hundreds of meters laid covered in grass. Within two weeks, TCD and the Nite Hawk crew was log driving 6ft long pieces of pipe down the blue trail, building black pipe log cabin retaining walls.




The next obstacle that was taken care of quickly was the need for a water source on the trail. This is something that every trail builder needs, soil compaction is futile without it, and trucking water buckets into the site is so very painful. A bright Nite Hawk employee who was key to the bike park project, Johnny Luge, mentioned that he used portable water tanks when flooding his world class naturbahn luge track during the winter. The conversation happened just before TCD took a trip home to Calgary, and after a three day break, Mr. Luge called headquarters just to let us know the trail now had 400 litres of flowing water to spray at our leisure.




The most interesting item the brain trust at Nite Hawk came up with, we actually can’t talk about. You know, prototypes, engineers and copyright lawyer stuff. But we can say it is pretty cool and will help all of us who work in the bush. Maybe one day Johnny Luge will release a picture and the name of his contraption.

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