A coastal breeze made its mid-morning rounds on Nov. 2, and Dave Baker breathed in the aroma of fresh, wet dirt.
Wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, cargo shorts, and work boots, Baker stood on top of a 12-foot mound inside the nearly completed River Bend Bike Park in Lompoc.
From the tallest point in the park, Baker took in a panoramic view of the full 5 acres of undulating earth that’s shaping up to be the first public bike park on the Central Coast.
The River Bend Bike Park will be a skills progression park, designed to help bikers to get increasingly better as they ride the park’s six different sections.
Looking down at the tracks and courses, Baker smiled as he pointed out the large pool of muddy water that had collected in the middle of the acreage. He was glad to know that the park’s drainage had worked exactly as planned during the Oct. 31 downpour.
“What started off as some guys pushing dirt together for kids to have fun has turned into one of the best parks in the nation,” he said. “People are going to travel to Lompoc to ride this park.”
Baker is chairman of the River Bend Bike Park Committee, which is made up of 10 dedicated volunteers who’ve spent every weekend working on the park since they broke ground on May 31.
Baker, a 39-year-old captain for the Carpinteria Fire Department, approached the city with the idea of building a bike park in 2011, and he’s been the project’s main organizer ever since.
“Every waking minute is spent on the park,” he said.
With the bike park’s completion nearing the finish line, the only obstacle standing in the way of a grand opening is funding for the final touches.
The committee still needs the money to cover the costs of lumber for mountain bike features that will sit at the park’s perimeter, as well as the funds to buy picnic benches and the last of the gates and fencing.
For the community, by the community
Donations have completely powered the park’s buildout, Baker said. Local businesses, individuals, and community organizations have donated cash, equipment, and labor to make the park possible.
The committee has raised about $150,000 for the project, with large donations from the Lompoc Rotary Club, the Santa Barbara Foundation, and the Healthy Lompoc Coalition, Baker said.
Local shops, like Aceco Equipment and Sunbelt Rentals, donated construction equipment, and Granite Construction donated equipment and labor. Different construction projects around Lompoc provided 500 truckloads of dirt for the park. But the biggest donations have been made by people volunteering their time to work on shaping the park.
Baker’s sister Judi, the committee’s secretary, said that since Jan. 1, around 350 volunteers have put in more than 5,000 hours of work on the project.
“It’s a labor of love,” said Morgan Chapman, a committee member who volunteers every weekend. “I fell in love with the project the first day I came out here.”
Chapman was spreading wood chips for the groundcover between trails on Nov. 2. The Lompoc native mostly rides a mountain bike on open trails but said he’s become more interested in riding parks since he started on the project.
“It’s been fun coming out here moving dirt and shaping dirt,” Chapman said. “The payoff will be the grand opening when kids are out here jumping, laughing, and smiling.”
Every weekend, volunteers work on building and sculpting dirt tracks and jumps. Shovels clang and crunch against the dirt as a mixed group of kids, teenagers, and adults—many of whom are meeting for the first time—push and pack dirt from the bottom of the slopes to the top.
“This is who the people of Lompoc are,” Mayor John Linn said. “We are a town of doers.”
More than 100 volunteers showed up over the weekend of Oct. 25 and 26, and those numbers boosted the organizers’ confidence.
“We turned a corner, and we could see a light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still a flicker,” Baker said.
Some volunteers traveled for more than an hour to help out. Jeremy Combs drove up from Ventura that weekend for the second Sunday in a row. The 35-year-old has ridden his entire life and works for bicycle manufacturer Giant.
“There’s not any major public bike parks in Southern California,” he said. “I think it’s great that this has something for everybody.”
After a thorough soaking from recent rains, the dirt was in mint condition for shaping bike trails and jumps on Nov. 2. Under clear skies, a handful of volunteers worked on the multiple trails that make up the park.
Pumping and jumping
The 12-foot slope Baker stood on, overlooking the park, is the drop-in point for the park’s jump line: a series of five consecutive jumps that range from 3 to 8 feet high. The jumps get higher from the left side of the line to the right.
It’s one of the park’s six sections. Four of these are pump tracks, which are designed so that riders can gain momentum without pedaling. The pump tracks range in size and complexity to suit riders with different skill levels, starting from beginners and moving up to advanced.
“It has something for every skill level,” Baker said. “We want to make it challenging and fun.”
The beginning of each track is marked with a dirt mound where riders drop in. They then are met with a series of rollers, which are smaller mounds designed for picking up speed. Then the tracks weave back around with large, crescent-sloped dirt berms that allow riders to make fast, sharp turns.
Closest to the park’s entrance is the starter track, which features 1-foot-tall rollers. Next to that is the beginner track with 18-inch rollers. The last pump track is for intermediate and advanced riders, where the rollers are bigger and the track requires more speed.
Sitting at the far end of the park are the jump lines, where riders can fly. The pump tracks are like the foothills of the bike park’s landscape, and the jump lines are like the mountain range looming large in the background.
The Hilride Progression Development Group based out of Oakland designed the park. The company also built the 14-acre Stafford Lake Bike Park in Novato and is currently constructing the 300-acre Griffin Bike Park in Terre Haute, Ind.
“More than any other park we’ve worked on in California or around the country, this volunteer effort has been huge from a wide range of folks in the community,” said Nat Lopes, a Hilride bike park designer who’s been working with Baker.
Baker’s been building bike jumps since he was a kid. The Lompoc native raced BMX bikes while growing up, but had to travel out of town to ride in a dedicated bike facility. He remembers building jumps closer to home with his friends in vacant lots and along the riverbed.
The vacant lots he and his friends built jumps on have since been developed, and Baker saw how this would be a limitation for his 7-year-old son.
“The opportunities for him are less than what they were for me,” he said.
Now that Baker has three kids of his own (two of whom were born since he started working on the bike park project), he wants them to have a safer place to play and progress on their bikes than he did.
His solution is the River Bend Bike Park.
“The community doesn’t have a safe, protected place to ride bicycles,” he said, “and now we will.”
The political wheels
The River Bend Bike Park project is bigger than Baker originally intended it to be, but he decided that if he was going to do the job, he might as well do it right.
Baker approached Mayor Linn for direction because getting a public bike park off the ground is a difficult process that brings with it a lot of liability issues.
Lompoc has never undertaken a project of this nature before, Linn said, and there’s no blueprint for building a city-run bike park.
“If you’ve never done it before, then you don’t know how to do it,” Linn said. “It’s been a learning curve for everybody.”
The project was channeled through the Lompoc Valley Parks, Recreation, and Pool Foundation (LVPRPF), a nonprofit organization that’s also overseen construction of a disc golf course, a remote-control car track, and a dog park in Lompoc.
Having a nonprofit entity oversee projects like these provides an operating structure that satisfies city hall, LVPRPF chairman Jim Mosby said.
The River Bend Bike Park has its own committee within the nonprofit and reports to its parent organization on the status of the project. LVPRPF gives the project legitimacy by handling the insurance and receiving the tax identification number, Mosby said.
There are six committees within LVPRPF that represent different recreational projects around Lompoc, including the Lompoc Valley Motorsports Committee, which is planning to build a motorsports park.
Work on the bike park is helping lay some of the groundwork for planning the motorsports park project, Linn said.
Even though the River Bend Bike Park project is powered completely by volunteers, it’s still treated like a professional contract, Baker said. The city applies the same standards to the volunteers that would be applied to any business being contracted to do the work. Before entering the park to work, volunteers must sign a release waiver that acknowledges they’re on a construction site with certain risks.
A project of this magnitude would usually cost half a million dollars, Baker said. But because volunteers have done most of the work with donated equipment and materials, the price has been considerably lower and didn’t cost taxpayers anything. The parking lot was the biggest expense, Baker said, because it has to be accessible for 80,000-pound fire trucks and waste trucks.
With funds raised through the committee, licensed engineers were hired to help the project meet the city’s standards for the parking lot and also to help make the park accessible to people with disabilities.
Because of the novel nature of the bike park project, organizers have had to change plans along the way: The grand opening was pushed back, drought-tolerant plants were included in the landscape, and some of the wood features for mountain bikers had to be scrapped.
The park, which is named after Al Walker of the Lompoc Rotary Club, will be free to the public. Riders are required to wear a helmet and to ride within their ability level at their own risk. Placards will be posted at the beginning of each track reminding riders to know their own limitations.
A camera mounted outside of the park will stream a live video feed to the park’s website, riverbendbikepark.com, allowing people to view the park from home.
“We’re really in the home stretch,” Baker said.
Contact Staff Writer Aaron Salazar at asalazar@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Nov 13-20, 2014.