Yellowknife has an incredible untapped potential for mountain biking! Unfortunately some past-times have seen a lot more investment than others in our community. A skills park is an important investment for kick-starting a broader community of mountain bikers, serves a previously ignored segment of our community and acts a means to attract and retain future residents.

Skills parks consist of a mix of natural and man-made features. These features are designed to replicate what riders would find on the trails and provide purpose-built training aids for developing crucial skills in a controlled risk setting. As a rider's skills and confidence improve, they are presented with increasingly difficult versions of any given feature, providing them with clear paths of progression.

Types of features include: wooden ladder bridges, skinnies, rock-gardens, jumps, rollers and drops.

Aside from being FUN, skills parks providing a community space for riders, a location for conducting programming and a great way to foster healthy active lifestyles.

Lots of different skills go into being a proficient mountain biker. A skills park provides the tools to develop these skills. By improving skills a rider builds their confidence and will ride better, safer, and more often!

With the goal of developing active lifestyles it’s important to keep kids on their bikes especially as they get older and other less conventional, and certainly less healthy, outlets for risk-taking become available. Risk-taking is popularly seen as highly meaningful to personal development, and will likely increase throughout adolescence. Rarely though will those risks be conducted in a controlled and targeted manner, which inspires confidence and develops the capacity for calculated risk-taking and avoidance.

Organised sports are a fantastic way for kids to get active, be social, and have a great time doing it. Unfortunately organised sports aren't for everybody. Hockey rinks and soccer turfs are fantastic hubs of community activity. But not every kid will be comfortable in those environments for a variety of reasons. Having alternative facilities which can still offer a sense of community and belonging can make a huge difference to developing healthy active lifestyles.

Without fun, exciting and 'cool' alternatives where do those kids go?

Parents and guardians have a lot of demands placed on them for their time. Meeting the demands of practice schedules, registrations, travel, coaching can be impossible for some families. Alternatives to organised sport are important!

Just in the off-season, or all year round. Having exciting and fun alternatives to organised sport helps keep our communities healthy and happy. It attracts newcomers and keeps residents, resident!