Coalition for Recreational Trails

Construction and Design

Cacapon State Park Foundation Mountain Bike Trail Program

With three RTP grants, we built Thunderstruck, a signature 3.1 mile long trail that descends over 1,100’ through some of the rockiest terrain on the east coast. We did this by hand building half of the trail with the assistance of the Appalachain Conservation Corps. We also built an amazing skills park, a beginner jump trail, and the start of a climb to the top of the mountain... over 6 miles of new trail for all ability levels.

This IMBA trail plan contains over 35 miles of planned mountain biking trails for the park, which we began building in February 2020 through extensive volunteer work and grass roots fundraising. This initial build resulted in 2.2 miles of professionally built trail that was built to be the NICA race course and an additional 0.9 mile advanced level trail. Prior to this, the volunteer group hand built over4 moles of new trail from 2018-2020. I lay this groundwork to provide a background of the hard work that was put into building trails in Cacapon State Park prior to being awarded our first RTP grant in 2020. We used all of the volunteer work in the application for the RTP grants and believe that this contributed significantly to our winning these grants. I addition, we have hosted 4 Enduro races to increase the awareness of the trails in the park to mountain bikers, and have hosted 3 NICA high school league races on the NICA racecourse we built.

We applied for 3 different RTP grants to develop mountain bike trails in Cacapon State Park, and were awarded all 3 in 2020, 2021, and 2022. The 3 grants totaled $450,000 and have resulted in some of the most iconic new trails in the east. We partnered with IMBA (international Mountain Bicycling Association) in the grants and worked together to enable using the grants as a Force Account so that IMBA did the build and billed the state DOT directly. We also partnered with the local county supervisors to provide the matching cash funds. In addition, the WV DNR and Cacapon State Park leadership have supported the mountain bike trail build and RTP builds throughout and have provided free housing, diesel, and even equipment to enable more miles of trails. Finally, we have a large, dedicated group of volunteers who have worked over 1,000 hours per year from 2018-2022 building new mountain bike trails in the park and helping provide the match for the grants.

With these 3 RTP grants, we built Thunderstruck, a signature 3.1 mile long trail that descends over 1,100’ through some of the rockiest terrain on the east coast. We did this by hand building half of the trail with the assistance of the Appalachain Conservation Corps. We also built an amazing skills park, a beginner jump trail, and the start of a climb to the top of the mountain... over 6 miles of new trail for all ability levels.

Thunderstruck was purposefully designed to utilize some of the most rugged and steep terrain available to truly showcase the amazing potential of this 6,000+ acre state park that sits on the border of West Virginia and Virginia, a short 1:30 drive away from the Washington DC suburbs. The initial flag line for the trail was laid out by IMBA as part of the Trail accelerator grant that we were awarded. The design phase required not only days of hiking, and sometimes scrambling and crawling, through steep, rocky terrain, but also required the amazing vision of the two trail planners from IMBA, Steve Kasacick and Rich Edwards. They worked closely with me, representing the Cacapon Foundation and area mountain bikers, and also with the park’s leadership and Trail Manager Eric Fitzpatrick, throughout the design phase. We hikes, crawled, and climbed through some of the rockiest areas multiple times to identify the optimal trail alignments, reflagging again and again. Eric and I struggled to envision how there could possibly be a trail in terrain we could hardly walk through! I have extensive photos of us all on the mountain flagging the trail corridor if you need any images to highlight the challenges.