Bike Park Report- Windham Mountain Bike Park- Building Kaaterskill Cruise

I arrived at the Windham Resort in the heart of New York’s Catskill mountains in the middle of June, becoming the fourth machine operator from Gravity Logic to come lend a hand in the building of Kaaterskill Cruise, the newest trail in the Windham Mountain Bike Park. This green trail we are building was the missing piece in the existing trail system.

Windham Resort is most well known the the mountain bike community as the most recent host to UCI World Cup racing on American soil, but it’s more than just a few race tracks. Gravity Logic had spent a previous summer there, building two blue trails, Wilderness Roll a blue jump trail, and Batavia Skill a blue hybrid trail with singletrack and machine built turns. The park was missing an easy green trail to get beginner riders started in the building of the skillset that park riding takes, so that’s why we have returned in 2017 to fill the void and in the process build one of the longest green trails in a bike park here in America.

Gregg Winter was running the show on the ground when I showed up in Windham. A long time machine operator with Gravity Logic, he was overseeing the building of Kaaterskill Cruise. With four Bobcat mini excavators and operators we were busy chasing each other down the mountain, working in groups of two, one operator out front grubbing and creating the initial trail and the other following behind doing the finishing work. 

The hardest part of building a good green trail is keeping the trail in the green designation and not allowing it to become blue. No jumps no banked turns, just rollers and canted turns, it’s a great challenge for a builder to keep a trail green while making it flow and fun.

Week after week we continued to create more fun green trail for the masses to enjoy. Over the course of the five and half weeks I was in Windham we completed new sections that allowed us to open Kaaterskill Cruise farther down the mountain before tying it in to Wilderness Roll to get riders back to the bottom of the mountain. While the entire trail will not be completed and open to the public until next summer, Windham Mountain Bike Park now boasts almost 3 miles of green trail that is open to the public!