Flagstaff Biking Organization 2024 Accomplishments

For approximately 22 years Flagstaff Biking Organization has worked to be a voice for cyclists in Northern Arizona. Here are some highlights of our work for 2024.

New League of American Bicyclists Certified Instructors for Flagstaff
Flagstaff Bike Month 2024
Local Planning Stakeholder Participation
Volunteer Trail Events and Trail Days
Directional MTB Trails
Buffalo Park-Oldham Trail Connector
Fort Tuthill Bike Park Maintenance
Flagstaff Trail Faeries
We need your help!
Thank you Trail Program Sponsors!

2024 Urban and Road Advocacy Wrap Up

New League of American Bicyclists Certified Instructors for Flagstaff!

We partnered with Metroplan Flagstaff and the City of Flagstaff to put 5 people through the League of American Bicyclists Certified Instructor Training. Metroplan Flagstaff coordinated the training events in partnership with the City of Flagstaff, and Flagstaff Biking Organization funded scholarships for all participants. This training equips individuals to teach best practices for riding bicycles legally, safely and confidently on roadways.

Among the new Instructors are a Coconino County Sheriff’s Deputy and a City of Flagstaff Police Officer. A Northern Arizona University Police Officer also participated in this training. FBO believes that one of the best ways to help ensure the safety of cyclists on local roadways is to have expertise amongst local law enforcement ranks. This is evidenced in part through the Flagstaff Police Department’s commitment to their Bicycle Safety Training and Citation Diversion Program.

The City of Flagstaff also now has three LAB Certified Instructors on staff, and Metroplan has one. These folks should be available to help teach bicycle safety and riding best practices at various events throughout the year.

^{2024 Bike Month human-powered, costume wearing bike parade riders.}

Flagstaff Bike Month 2024

Once again, FBO hosted Flagstaff Bike Month in May!

Our annual event included a Proclamation from the City, the annual Bike Bazaar bike swap and parade, a Kidical-Mass Ride with ice cream and treats for participants, and Bike to Breakfast Day.

Hundreds of folks rode throughout the month and logged 2574 rides for a total of 24,470 miles recorded.

Our 2025 event will be returning to a single week rather than the whole month. Stay tuned for details soon! A huge “thank you” to our generous 2024 Bike Month Sponsors!

$1000

$500

Local Planning Stakeholder Participation

We partnered with local road riders and runners to help convince the Coconino County Board of Supervisors to designate a large part of Lake Mary Road as a Recreational Corridor. This designation is already helping to better distinguish this road as a recreational resource for cyclists and runners and hopefully improve safety for all road users. The County has installed signage notifying motorists that they are apt to encounter riders and runners, and to share the roadway.

FBO board members and volunteers attended community meetings and pored through the Draft Regional Plan to help ensure that bicyclist’s interests were well represented in future planning for both transportation and recreation infrastructure. You can read the input that we submitted to the City Planners here.

FBO participated in a stakeholder interview and with input on the Fort Tuthill Master Plan Revision. Our input is focused on some expansion to the Bike Park and developing the trail system in the park to integrate with an eventual stacked loop system in the surrounding Coconino National Forest.

FBO Board members have attended several City of Flagstaff Open Spaces Commission meetings, met with the City Parks, Recreation, Open Spaces and Events (PROSE) Director and Staff, written comments and provided input on the trails plan for the Greater Observatory Mesa Area Trails Plan. This process has been, frankly, extremely frustrating and misguided. Our input has been consistent with our initial comments which are being mostly ignored because of input from a few biased individuals in key appointments. We are hoping the final product that PROSE chooses to take to the City Council will better incorporate our reasonable proposals that include a few directional mountain bike trails and more sustainable trail alignments.

Donate to the FBO Trail Maintenance and Construction Fund!

Donate to the Flagstaff Biking Organization General Fund!

2024 Trail Program Wrap Up

Volunteer Events and Trail Days

Our Trail Days program featured seven volunteer events this year in partnership with the Coconino National Forest Flagstaff Ranger District (FRD). Participants contributed 2,010 hours of labor, a value of $60,300 in volunteer labor to help the FRD with year 3 of the awesome Mt. Elden-Dry Lake Hills (MEDL) Recreation Project. Thanks to the dedication of our volunteers, we helped the FRD trail crew open two new directional downhill trails, build new realignments of trails impacted by fire and flooding, as well as building a loop trail around Schultz Tank. Totaling nearly 13 miles, these new trails reflect not only the skill and commitment of the FRD trail crew but also a variety of riding experiences from flowy trails to technical challenges as well as trails aimed at hiking, solitude, and exploring.

The first four events in May, June, and July, focused on the Schultz Pass where we helped the FRD trail crew with realignments of lower Sunset and Little Elden trails, as well as building an entirely new half mile section of the Arizona National Scenic trail. On the June 1^st National Trails Day, we helped build a new singletrack trail that loops around Schultz Tank with scenic views of the San Francisco Peaks. This trail is 0.4 miles in length and was named Tonteel, the Navajo name for ocean and ‘water that is wide’ which certainly applies to Schultz Tank, the only body of water for miles around. With these efforts there is now a more seamless intersection of trails around Schultz Pass, including the new directional mountain bike trail Full Sail. There is clear, new signage in for different users wishing to access multi-use trails such as Sunset or Broadside, thereby allowing travel with fewer interruptions of other users, and most importantly, keeping everyone as safe as possible. In August we helped with deferred maintenance on Lower Oldham Trail including a short reroute to bring it up to standard. In September, we partnered with the Coconino Trail Riders and Northern Arizona Trail Runners Association on the always popular Pedals v Pistons v Horseshoes v Hiking Boots Trail Day on the Kelly multi-use trail system. This event encourages cooperation and community between all single-track trail users. In October, we shuttled up to the top of Mt. Elden to help with the realignment of upper Oldham trail. The new trail provides for sustainable trail access to the summit of Mount Elden as well as moving it away from the bottom of the drainage.

Directional MTB Trails

Flagstaff Biking Organization hired local trail and bike park builders, Flagline Trails, with funding provided by a Catena Foundation grant to build Full Sail Trail. The trail was opened to the public by the Flagstaff Ranger District this spring. Funding was matched with FRD and FBO project management time. The trail is a machine-built flow trail providing a roller-coaster experience with numerous table-tops, jumps, berms and other challenge features, but also option lines for rolling, rather than jumping features. This project is not only a first on the District but also one of the first in the state of Arizona. We were recently awarded a $5,000 grant from the Mountain Bike Association of Arizona for maintenance and a tune-up of the features in spring 2025.

During the MEDL collaborative group meetings with stakeholders in 2018, FBO advocated for adoption and realignment of the steep and technical trail locally known as Ginger. This concept was included in the MEDL plan and since opening as “Meteoride” in April, this trail has become a favorite among expert riders as a hand-built technical trail that incorporates natural terrain features. Congratulations to the FRD trail crew, dedicated volunteers, and especially the Thursday build crew, for Meteoride being awarded runner up Best New Tech trail of 2024!

Buffalo Park-Oldham Trail Connector

This fall, construction began on a realignment of part of Lower Oldham Trail, which is part of the Arizona National Scenic Trail, from Buffalo Park. The project is being executed in partnership with the FRD and as part of that agreement, FBO hired Flagline Trails, to construct a 48″ wide, aggregate surfaced pathway that is 0.7 miles in length and drops off the mesa upon which Buffalo Park is located. The old alignment was unsustainable and out of character with the Buffalo Park-Flagstaff Urban Trails. The new trail provides an easier and more inviting connection to the Forest Service Trail System. Half of the project funding was provided by Nackard Pepsi and Joy Cone and FBO matched the second half of the approximate cost of the $91,000 project from our Trail Fund, supported by individual contributions and Trail Program Sponsors. Representatives from FBO, FRD, Nackard Pepsi, Joy Cone, Flagline Trails, The Arizona Trail Association and the Flagstaff Trail Faeries all attended a ribbon cutting ceremony on January 2nd, 2025, to formally open this realignment.

Fort Tuthill Bike Park Maintenance

FBO has had some money set aside that remained from the original fund-raising efforts to build the Fort Tuthill Bike Park. This year we spent over $14,000 to fund Coconino County working with Flagline Trails to revamp and maintain the flow-jump lines by adding some width and refinement to these tracks, making them better than ever.

For the long run, we have begun advocating through the Fort Tuthill Master Plan revisions for some potential additions to the Fort Tuthill Bike Park to, hopefully, add some more jump-lines and maybe other improvements.

Flagstaff Trail Faeries

The Flagstaff Trail Faeries are a volunteer trail crew that works closely with the FRD, with some support from FBO, to address the miles of deferred maintenance on Flagstaff trails. This season the Faeries spent much of the summer months on drainage improvements and tread repair to Secret trail in the Fort Valley trail system. This trail was severely impacted by the 2022 Pipeline Fire and subsequent flooding. Upon completion of that effort, the Faeries built a 0.2 mile realignment of the Little Elden trail to replace the old trail in the drainage bottom with sweet, new contouring singletrack. They then wrapped up the season by helping the FRD trail crew on upper Oldham trail, as well as lending a hand to Flagline Trails with the Buffalo Park connector. The Faeries contributed 764 volunteer hours on 36 trail days!

We need your help!

In 2025, we are again working on a partnership with the FRD on new trail construction as part of MEDL! We will be fundraising for the hiring of trail crews while continuing our history of organized volunteer events.

To our volunteers—thank you for dedicating your time and energy to the trails.

To our donors and sponsors—your support helps us support these efforts and bring new trails to life and maintain the ones we love.

To the FRD trail crew—your dedication and skill ensures the best possible outcome.

This coming year, more than ever, the trails will need support from volunteers and organizations like ours!

Forest Service leadership at the national level has decided to cancel seasonal hires outside of wildland firefighters in 2025 because of budget shortfalls. This decision directly affects the hiring of FRD trail crew as well as the long-term health and well-being of the Coconino National Forest.

Your support through volunteerism and donations to our Trail Fund, or sponsorship from your business, can help offset the substantial reduction in the Flagstaff Ranger District Trail Crew’s capacity. Any work you do goes directly to help offset the lack of seasonal USFS crew workers. Any money donated to the FBO Trail Fund goes directly to supporting volunteer events and to hiring trail builders to do work on the ground. (All of us at FBO are volunteers too, so we don’t get any of your financial donations.)

Over the past year (plus a little…), FBO has put nearly $300,000 in value on the ground on our local trail system. That is a combination of volunteer time-value and actual dollars. We can continue to do this if our community keeps showing up with donations, sponsorship and volunteerism!

Thank you for being part of the Flagstaff trail community. You make our trails great and our community a great place to live!