RTP grant awarded to LRD for Beaver Creek Trails Porject

Work on the Lincoln Ranger District's first dedicated mountain bike trails and on a series of off-highway vehicles connector trails should get underway late this summer thanks to a $82,393 grant awarded to the district this month under the Recreational Trails Program administered by the Montana State Parks.

The Beaver Creek Trails Project includes development of seven to eight miles of mountain bike trails, as well as a series of connector trails that will create looped routes connecting the Lone Point area to Lincoln Gulch, a trail from Lincoln Gulch that connects into the Lincoln Ditch Road and a trail from the Lincoln Ditch Road to Pine Grove Campground on Beaver Creek.

Although the trails were among those included in the Blackfoot non-winter Travel Plan, the cost of building them requires grant funding.

Josh Lattin, the resource specialist for the Ranger District, said support for construction of the trails became evident during the Southwest Crown Regional Trails Check-In hosted in Lincoln in late February 2017.

"There were several people from both the ATV and the biking community who were there who were involved in drafting that plan," he said. "When I posed the questions 'does anybody care, is this interesting?' They were like 'yeah, we'd love to see it actually built."

Lattin said he figured a grant application would be successful because they had so many stakeholders on board and, just as importantly, because they already had the National Environmental Protection Act review process completed.

Lattin said the grant also required a minimum of a five percent cash match and another 20 percent match through things like volunteer hours.

The cash match had already been met last summer, before the application went in. After the LOR Foundation awarded a $100,000 grant to the Blackfoot Challenge to help Lincoln develop its economy, the committee that ultimately became Envision Lincoln set aside $10,000 of that money to use as matching funds for the RTP application.

Likewise, community members working with the Upper Blackfoot Working Group* and the Lincoln Valley Chamber of Commerce agreed that completion of the Beaver Creek project is an important first step in providing additional recreational and economic opportunities for the area.

"The main reason it succeeded was because it was so well supported," Lattin said. "At the actual presentation it was me, Terry Spath, Laurie Richards, Karyn Good and Frank Malek. That made a world of difference, (showing) that this isn't just happening in a silo. Folks want this, both from the recreation side of it and from the economic side of it."

The Upper Blackfoot Working Group, which has been developing local collaborative partnerships to find ways to balance recreation, forest restoration and conservation, highlighted the broad support in a letter to the State Trail Advisory Committee members.

"It is all too common for motorized and non-motorized recreationists, loggers, conservationists and local community members to disagree and fight each other over trails and access opportunities on our National Forests. The Beaver Creek Trail system is a clear exception to that rule," the group wrote in a letter of support. "Implementation of the Beaver Creek Trails Project will be another important step towards the realization of our vision and proof that by working together we can accomplish more good work on the ground for many interests."

"It's not every day you see conservation folks and motorized & non-motorized interests come together in support of a trail system, but by working together we just turned $10,000 into $100,000," Karyn Good, the local organizer for the Blackfoot Challenge and the Wilderness Society said. "This is a big win for Envision Lincoln, the motorized/non-motorized community and supportive partners."

Lattin also credited the support of the Chamber of Commerce as being particularly helpful to the grant application. The LVCC has been working to improve cycling opportunities in Lincoln for several years, and the mountain bike trails included in the travel plan stemmed from a Chamber-funded trails assessment created by the International Mountain Bike Association several years ago.

Barring another busy fire season, work on building the trails should get underway in August, once the money from the grant becomes available, Lattin said.

Although they already got a bit of a start this year with survey and design, he said the trails are little more than flag lines that will be reviewed and fine-tuned over the next month with the help of Mountain Bike and ATV organizations who will help ensure the trials are properly laid out. They'll then be reviewed in July for any unexpected impacts to wildlife or historic sites.

"Come August, if we're not on fire, we'll start cutting corridors," Lattin said. "Maybe this fall actually getting machinery in through contracts to construct the trail, but I would expect most of the actual dirt moving to take place next spring."

He hopes to see the trails open for business by next summer.

Montana State Parks, which administers the federally funded RTP Grants, is taking public comment through June 8 on the 50 projects across the state that were awarded funds. The RTP grants are funded out of Federal Highway Trust Fund, and grant applicants can include government agencies as well as private associations and clubs.