Trailblazing Door County: Local Groups Look to Create New Trail Network

Photo by Jackson Parr.

Visitors and locals admire Door County for its natural beauty. The explosion of silent sports has become the extension of that beauty. Now, outdoor enthusiasts and groups such as the Door County Silent Sports Alliance (DCSSA) are looking to take that one step further.

“When you look at Duluth, Hayward, Seely, all these places are spending millions of dollars to expand their trails and doing it with success,” said Brian Fitzgerald, head of trails with the Friends of Peninsula State Park. “They are attracting folks to those locations to vacation, to have a second home, to live. If we can even be used in the same sentence as those communities it would be wonderful.”

So on Nov. 7 the DCSSA invited Michelle Barker, regional director of the International Mountain Bike Association (IMBA) to tour the county’s parks and speak to locals about what trails can do for a community and how to navigate the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and local government to implement them.

“What DCSSA is trying to do is rally the troops in the area,” said Randy Sahs, president of the DCSSA. “There’s a fair amount of interest from outsiders.”

Sahs admits that similar efforts in the past have failed to get any traction. But in his last year as the group’s president, Sahs hopes this last effort will be more than just a few locals saying they want to ride their mountain bikes on something new.

“The state parks have this master plan and until we do something with the master plan, we’re not going to put bike trails in parks,” said Sahs. Putting trails in county or city land would only need the blessing of the local government, but Sahs and Fitzgerald both think the state parks are where the true benefits will be reaped.

“A big part of it is that the people at the DNR want to see plans,” said Sahs. “We invited in some professionals to help plan this, to get a start on it and present the plans to the state parks of what we would like to do and how we’re going to sustain these trails.”

First off, the DNR wants to be sure that any work won’t interfere with the natural resources of a park or the county. But the DNR is also interested in what kind of impact an expanded trail network would have on the area. The plan presented to the DNR will have to include information on the potential economic impact and details on how they are going to be maintained.

Sahs is also hopeful that this effort will be the one to get a hold because the master plan for Door County state parks is slated to open up for changes in the next few months. The most recent plan for Peninsula State Park was written in 1981, before mountain biking had entered the public consciousness.

Sahs said Barker was impressed with the potential she saw in the Door County landscape and that the IMBA was considering making the area its own chapter similar to Copper Harbor, Mich. The designation would be in tandem with Brown County’s trail networks, but Sahs thinks that can only be a good thing.

“If we can co-align with them…the more traction we’re going to get with it. The ultimate goal is to get trails in our parks,” said Sahs. “If we can give them reason to come to our county and visit our parks and stay at our hotels and dine at our restaurants, I think it’s going to do a lot of good for the community.”