Cycling enthusiasts will soon have a mountain bike park close to home. Volunteers will help build Seattle’s first mountain bike skills park on Jan. 21, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day of service.

The event was organized by the Backcountry Bicycle Trails Club (BBTC) and Seattle Parks and Recreation. As part of the I-5 Colonnade project, the park was built completely by volunteers, and contains two acres of trails and obstacles meant to hone the skills of Seattle mountain bikers.

“I applaud the BBTC on working with the city to obtain this land and to arrange matching funding,” said Jeremy Pettibon, the volunteer project leader of this particular project. “Their approach is a good example of civic engagement and democratic action, and the Colonnade park is a sign of what can be accomplished as far as other types of recreation in Seattle, such as skate parks.”

The park itself is rather unusual. It is the only mountain bike skills park in the nation in an urban area.

The entirety of the park is built under I-5 between Eastlake and Capitol Hill in a previously unused swath of land that has not seen any precipitation since the freeway was constructed. The lack of moisture in the ground poses a considerable and unprecedented obstacle to the BBTC and their volunteers.

“Nobody has taken an open area under an overpass and developed it into a mountain biking park,” said Jon Kennedy, volunteer director for the BBTC. “The challenge is working with soil we haven’t seen before and hasn’t seen a drop of water in forty years; we are used to building linear trails out in the woods and the mountains.”

Construction of the park now consists of two phases: One has been complete since 2006 and another will be the focus of volunteer efforts. The first phase included a novice area, as well as intermediate areas for more advanced mountain bikers. Phase two, to be completed just south of the novice area, will contain areas with a relatively higher difficulty level.

While the park has made quite a few fans in its relatively short life, not everyone in the Seattle mountain biking community accepts the park.

One such mountain biker is David Carlson, a local cyclist visiting Gregg’s Cycles.

“[The park] is all right, if that’s your thing, I guess,” Carlson said. “It just doesn’t feel like real mountain biking to me. There aren’t any trees or anything there.”

[Reach reporter Anthony Michael Erickson at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]