DNR presents awards at Mid-America Trails and Greenways Conference

Indiana DNR Release:



The Indiana DNR presented its annual trails group and project awards to the Hoosier Mountain Bike Association and the Nickel Plate Trail project, respectively, earlier this week at the Mid-America Trails and Greenways Conference in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Dale Brier of the DNR Division of Outdoor Recreation, said that the HMBA has done "amazing" things when it comes to making Indiana a leader in mountain bike trails, more than earning the state's Trail Organization of the Year award.

"The amount of trail they constructed in just five short years would be enough to award them with this honor, but they’ve done so much more, he said. "They’ve helped change the way Hoosiers think and react to mountain biking."

According to Brier, in 2005, the Indiana DNR had one mountain bike trail that was an experiment that had been on the ground for 10 years without moving forward. HMBA, after working with DNR to change property rules, has assisted in building trails in five state parks, as well as in numerous other Indiana locations.

"Where once public land managers viewed mountain bikes as more trouble than they are worth, now they welcome HMBA’s assistance to build trails," Brier said. "While HMBA has great trail builders, they also have a great group of volunteers who make HMBA a well-rounded organization."

HMBA-run events include the Brown County Breakdown, the Midwest women's clinic, and kids and racer clinics. The HMBA includes advocates who attend public meetings across the state, and members who do the behind-the-scenes tasks to keep the 501 (c) (3) organization running and managing $400,000 worth of federal and state grants.

The state's Project of the Year award went to the Nickel Plate Trail, a 40-plus mile rail/trail corridor running from Cassville in Howard County to Rochester in Fulton County. The corridor was purchased from the Norfolk and Southern Railroad via the Federal Railbanking program for the purpose of developing a trail for hiking, bicycling, and other non-motorized recreational uses.

"With 12.8 miles of the trail currently paved and 20 additional miles currently being developed, the Nickel Plate Trail is ideal for walking, hiking, running, bicycling, skating, or even cross-country skiing," Brier said. "Overall it is comfortably wide, smooth, and maintains an almost unnoticeable grade.

The speed and the relatively low cost at which the trail has been built separated the Nickel Plate from other trails under consideration.

"To put nearly 13 miles of paved trail on the ground, the group has barely spent over a million dollars, and that even includes two bridges," he said. "While many other similar trails run closer to $1 million per mile, doing 13 miles for that amount seems impossible. The volunteer base is amazing; they even have people with heavy construction equipment.

"No other project comes close to doing it better than the Nickel Plate Trail."

For more on the conference at which the awards were presented, see
http://www.michigantrails.org/trails-conference/.