Mountain bikers are regenerating wasteland by paying the government to do it
Non-native species like Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine are often favored for their timber properties. The trees are planted in “coupes”—areas of several acres—at a time, “and they’ll plant them in straight rows, so they’re easier to harvest.” All of this results in a forest that’s “very genetically undiverse and a really bad habitat for wildlife,” Astley explains, with trees of uniform height blocking light from the forest floor, preventing other species from growing.
If this plantation-style forest wasn’t good for biodiversity, Astley and his co-founders quickly realized it wasn’t good for their business either. “The two things don’t make good bedfellows, commercial forestry and a mountain bike park,” he says. The mountain bike trails—narrow strips of dirt rarely more than a meter wide—don’t cover much actual surface area. “Percentage-wise, we’re probably using 1.5 percent of the site,” Astley explains. But the longest trails wind through the forest for 5 kilometers, so they require a lot of space.
“If you cut down a couple of trees, you could close 10 trails for six months, and the impact on our business would be huge,” Astley says. In the 11 years the bike park has been in operation, NRW has tried to avoid cutting down any pairs of trees in Gethin Woodland’s “core area”—the 120-hectare area where their existing trails are located, he says. “But we got to a point where NRW said, ‘We can’t allow you to develop any more trails up the hill because it’s just going to make it harder and harder for us to get the timber.’” It was clear that something had to change. And rewilding—actively helping the forest around the trails return to its pre-planting state—seemed like the ideal solution.
Astley, a zoology graduate, has always been “ecologically minded,” he says. “I think morally, businesses have a role to play in the fight we’re facing, with climate change and biodiversity loss and so on.” At the same time, he and his colleagues realized that a mixed forest that included native species would be better able to withstand the many threats that could threaten the park’s future.
“Before we started work on the trails here, in 2013, there was a major outbreak of a disease called Phytophthora ramorumhas infected larch trees all over the UK,” he explains. “There are a lot of larch trees here, probably 30 per cent, and fortunately, NRW’s predecessor removed them all just before we opened, because they knew we couldn’t take over a site with all these dangerous dead trees,” he says. But similar businesses aren’t always so lucky. “Revolution Bike Park in mid-Wales has just closed for over a year because their hill has started to Phytophthora ramorum“They had to clear the whole hill,” Astley said.
Astley explains that in addition to being more susceptible to disease outbreaks, mono-species forests, with their trees arranged in straight rows, are also less resistant to wildfires. “Last July, there was a big fire on the back of our hill and the wind blew it towards us,” he says. “For about a week, our lift road was covered in smoke and the fire brigade was dropping water from helicopters to try to put it out. It was really scary.” The more they thought about it, Astley says, the more he and his colleagues realized that recreating nature made sense — both economically and environmentally. Compared to the current monoculture, a natural forest would be “much more resilient in every way,” he says. “We realized there was an opportunity to try and win on two fronts.”
