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After putting in thousands of volunteer hours and seeking out donations, a nonprofit foundation celebrated the grand opening of its first major project—a new mountain bike park for people of all ages and skill levels. KSMU’s Kaitlyn Schwers attended Saturday’s grand opening of Two Rivers Bike Park in Highlandville to learn more.
Matt O’Reilly is the founder of TrailSpring, a nonprofit that builds single track, off-road bike trails. After a year of work from professionals and volunteers, the park’s first set of public trails are open.
“These are purpose built mountain biking trails and they’re professionally designed and built, so purpose built mountain biking trails have the right kind of flow and grades to them to be suitable for mountain biking. It’s a facility’s design for skills progression through all skill levels, so you can start as a beginner and there are features here to kind of build your way up to an advanced level rider,” O’Reilly said.
Kurt Englebrecht attended the Two Rivers’ grand opening with his wife, Edith. They hope to use the park to build their biking skills.
“We’re more back country bikers, not the extreme mountain bikers. But the neat thing about this facility, or this area, it accommodates both," he said.
Ashley Larson, another rider, says she’s glad to see a new park open since there aren’t many in the area.
She said, “Right now there’s only Sac River, which is really close which is right outside Springfield on the north side, so this is kind of the next closest one other than Branson.”
Two Rivers sits on 380 acres of land with eight and a half miles of trail, but TrailSpring plans on adding more in the future—to Two Rivers, and elsewhere. O’Reilly’s goal is to build 30 miles of trail in three years.
“TrailSpring will be looking for partnerships with the city parks and City Utilities to use public land and build trail facilities there as well, and that’s our next goal is to be able to partner with the municipalities and do more trail facilities,” said O’Reilly.
Two Rivers Bike Park is located at 5055 Two Rivers Road in Highlandville.
You can learn more about TrailSpring’s future projects on its Facebook page or trailspring.org.
For KSMU News, I’m Kaitlyn Schwers.