NEDERLAND — Nederland’s pump track is just a tiny little thing, built of dirt, on a private lot tucked between a vertical gardening wall and Middle Boulder Creek on the main commercial drag. But Billy Giblin, Nederland’s mayor, says its road to creation has been “shockingly controversial.”
Some cycling advocates say that itself is a shock, given how pump tracks have been stacking up across Colorado and offering kids a safe, centralized and inclusive place to play for at least the last couple decades.
They’re in towns and cities along I-25 and I-70 and tucked away in places like Steamboat Springs and Leadville. High schools are building them to give kids an alternative to traditional ball sports and a low-stress entry to mountain biking. Communities are kicking down cash for their construction and picking up shovels to maintain them.
Kate Rau, founder and director of Colorado High School Cycling League, which started in 2009 and now has 160 schools participating, says whether they’re simple dirt ovals like the one on Ned’s main street or sprawling asphalt ones like Erie Revolution Pump Track, “pump tracks are places where kids can learn new skills, make new friends and simply play, nonstop, for hours.”
But a track in Nederland has been nearly impossible to bring to fruition — and the tiny one with a single loop, small jumps and banked-turns-under-construction was done without a permit or other go-ahead from town authorities. Many people, including Miranda Fisher, Nederland’s town and zoning administrator from 2021 to May 2024, say the difficulty exists because the town board has a history of getting “stuck” when it comes to making “complex and polarizing” decisions.
What confuses people like Rau is exactly how a pump track could be so controversial.
That’s a complex issue involving multiple factors. First, Nederland is a statutory town where authority rests in an elected mayor and board of trustees. Residents living inside town limits — around 1,400 — elect the mayor and board, vote on local issues and pay taxes to the town.
But another nearly 2,000 people live in the same ZIP code as Nederland. And although many shop in “Ned,” use the library, community center and teen center, send their kids to Nederland schools and otherwise center their lives within the town at the base of the Indian Peaks Wilderness, they can’t vote and they don’t pay property taxes or water and sewer taxes to the town.
That leaves small decisions, like whether to build a pump track, and big ones, like whether to build a new day care center, or how to redevelop a crumbling main street or how to fund construction of a dam on Boulder Creek to create new reservoir, to the same seven elected officials and around one-third of the population of the greater Nederland area.
Those larger issues deserve their own stories. But the tale of the pump track that almost wasn’t may serve as a useful example of how effectively a town does or doesn’t work together.
Barriers to a kid-friendly amenity
The desire for a Nederland pump track goes back to at least 2018, when Josh Lynch was vice chair of the newly formed Nederland Parks, Recreation & Open Space Advisory board.
That board, with help from the mountain bike advocacy group Nederland Area Trails Organization, thought the best place to put one was Guercio Field, once the main staging ground for the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival and the annual NedFest music festival and a former soccer field next to the teen center, which has a skate park on the opposite side.
Despite getting the go-ahead from the board, as they started an application for a Great Outdoors Colorado grant, Lynch said he had “two town members start coming to our meetings and literally screaming at me.”
Their beef was that the parks and recreation board violated open meeting laws and town bylaws “and that nothing we did was legal,” said Lynch, who denies the allegations. But when the town members took their complaints to the board of trustees, the trustees asked the parks and rec board to withdraw their application, he said.
The lot remained vacant and a pump track didn’t become a focal point of conversation again until April 2023.
Then a trio of Nederland cycling advocates and dads — one from inside Nederland town limits and two from outside — asked a new parks and recreation board for $5,000 cover the cost of designing a passive, dirt pump track to be built at the town’s centrally located Chipeta Park, with a basketball court, playground, grassy field, picnic structure and fishing pond for 12-and-unders near Middle Boulder Creek.
Rex Madden, one of the proponent dads, said a pump track there would give local kids another positive activity to do, add to Ned’s existing bike culture, potentially increase tourism and generate revenue.
With the parks and rec board’s approval, Madden, Sam Ovett and Jesse Seavers, an excavator and then town trustee, took their request to the town board, which Fisher said voted to allocate $10,000 to the design. “But then the original plan got lost” and the passive track became a big asphalt track, she said, and the proposed construction budget went from $25,000 to $250,000 or $500,000.
There was also controversy around building it at Chipeta Park, which many, including Giblin, felt was too small for such a structure. Others thought wildlife, including moose, that wanders the park would be impacted. The pump track advocates decided to ask the community how it felt, put it to a survey and say they gathered 450 signatures from supporters.
That’s where the issue of town residents versus area residents enters the picture.
Nederland’s complicated public process
As Giblin, Fisher, Lynch and the pump track dads all know, many households who consider themselves Nederland families live beyond Nederland town boundaries.
So even though many of the petition signatures belonged to these residents, their wishes technically didn’t matter.
Giblin said he “often weighs” this demographic’s wishes, needs and desires “equally on community issues.”
“That said, I do not like it when out-of-town-limits folks tell us how to govern ourselves,” he added. He mostly listens “to residents of the town who are paying water and sewer fees and business owners whether they are residents or not,” he said.
“But for the pump track I did weigh somewhat equally what the people inside and outside of town limits wanted.”
Fisher said the board should have decided on the Chipeta track themselves.
But Seavers decided the most democratic way to get it built was to take it to a public vote asking if people wanted it at Chipeta Park. It was defeated 286 to 196 in the April 2 city election, with the location, not the creation of a pump track itself, being the reason it failed, Giblin said. “But the thing has become shockingly controversial, even though it really is something I believe is meant to be an amenity for the community,” he added. Especially when, after the vote, Madden, Seavers and Ovett decided they were tired of relying on public process.
They wanted it and they built it
In their quest to increase cycling options for kids in Nederland, Madden, Seavers and Ovett joined a long line of people who have advocated for more trails and a stronger cycling community for decades.
There’s the Nederland Area Trails Organization, which formed to “help deliver local, Nederland-area insight and expertise into the unique trail system we all know and love.”
There’s Singletrack Mountain Bike Adventures, an offshoot of Lake Eldora Race Team at Ned’s local ski hill Eldora, which has taught kids to mountain bike since 1993.
Both Nederland middle school and Nederland high school, which are under one roof as Nederland Middle Senior High School, have seen significant growth on their mountain bike teams since they started around 2016. And Madden has led and effort to introduce Nederland Elementary School kids to mountain biking through the SHRED program, which offers free bikes to tykes who don’t have them.
Heather Williams, program director for Singletrack Mountain Bike Adventures, says Nederland’s trails, including those at West Magnolia and Mud Lake Open Space, “can be overwhelming and intimidating to young athletes who are new to biking, so for that, a pump track or any small, little bike park area right in town, is wonderful. It provides a safe, comfortable space for newer riders to really develop those skills and give that confidence that they can apply to area trails.”
The sense that Nederland hasn’t done enough to create safe places for kids to hang out is part of what drove the dads to go rogue after the Chipeta Park plan failed and decide to build a track on their own.
To do so, they enlisted the help of a longtime resident and developer named Ron Mitchell known for having an independent streak. Mitchell owns multiple lots throughout Nederland that he has plans to develop. One sits on East 1st Street alongside Middle Boulder Creek and is zoned for high density residential. Half of the lot is currently paid parking that records show he may one day develop into workforce housing. But the other half, which touches the creek and which he refers to as a “park,” was vacant.
In late May, the dads showed up at the lot with Seavers’ excavating equipment. Giblin says they didn’t attempt to pull a permit to do so, nor did they have one. “They just started digging without the board having any idea that this was a consideration,” he said. “And then the board started getting emails after neighbors approached them with questions and they said they had every right to dig.”
Seavers said the group studied the town’s development codes and learned they could legally build the track because it was on private property and because dirt pump tracks are considered passive recreation. So when they discovered the town was considering issuing a cease and desist order, they let others know and a campaign began to call the board out.
“They were trying to call it a sports facility versus passive recreation, and the code is really unclear about that,” Seavers said. “And they were essentially going to try to tell us that you can’t ride bikes in a residential zone or change your earth to make it optimized for bikes.”
Giblin said two details made what they were doing “confusing on private land set out for public use: who is liable if someone gets hurt, and the possibility that the land lies in a flood plain.” But after “a million people dogpiled on the town” because it appeared they were “being unreasonable,” he decided to back off the order, because “it was such a small amount of excavation.”
The flood plain issue remains a question, “but at the moment we’re kind of just letting it lie,” he said.
A win for people who love pump tracks
Ovett says the track has had kids on it often since it was built nearly two months ago. Adults are riding it, too, he says.
An employee at Tin Shed Sports, the only bike shop in town, said they support the track. And according to both Giblin and Seavers, several new spots are being batted around by several different entities for a bigger, better one.
One of those sites is land Boulder Valley School District owns, up by Nederland Middle Senior High School, and near the start of one of the West Magnolia trails. Neither Rob Price, BVSD superintendent, nor Gavan Goodrich, Ned Middle Senior High principal, returned calls for comment, in Goodrich’s case because he is on summer sabbatical. But Seavers and Giblin both say they’ve gotten positive input from the school officials indicating they support the idea of a pump track at that location.
That would be a win in all kinds of ways, says Giblin. It’s out of town and not contested; it’s near the hub of trails Ned is most well-known for; and it’s at the school officials have long said they want to turn into BVSD’s “mountain school.”
Kids in Ned need more positive things to do or they’ll leave town for Boulder, said Fisher.
“I think this is yet another example, like childcare, where the town really needs to weigh out the interests of the larger Peak to Peak region, because those are going to be the users and there already aren’t enough kids in Nederland,” she added.