Sydney is a hard place for beginner mountain bikers to learn and gain confidence. Most of the terrain is steep, techy and slabby, and many of the existing trails are narrow, which can feel pretty daunting if you’ve never ridden off-road before. The new Wyatt Ave Bike Park on Sydney’s Northern Beaches has been designed to give mini-shredders and freshly minted mountain bikers a starting point to build their skills, and work their way up to the likes of Golden Jubilee, Bare Creek Bike Park and some of the not totally sanctioned but well known trails in the area.
Situated next to John Colet Primary School, the Wyatt Ave Bike Park targets kids this age. While it was not built in collaboration with the school itself — they wanted basketball courts on this parcel of land — the Council opted to construct a mini-skills park instead on the 40x60m plot.
“It’s really on two blocks of land that you’d have a house on side-by-side — if that — so it really limited us to how much we could put in there, and I was keen to put in as much as we could to get kids to build their skills,” says James ‘Cannonball’ Hall, who got involved in the project through Sydney’s Trailcare advocacy group.
Wyatt Ave | A paradise for beginner mountain bikers
Why not a pump track, you ask? We love pump tracks, but as was pointed out to Hall by a close friend, they’re not all that great for multiple users.
“Sometimes you get one rider on there, and they sort of hog it. You really need a slightly downhill pump track that has a defined finish and a spot to line up,” he says
It’s not just kids that are riding here, the features are designed to help folks of all ages progress. Each of the features in the park is there for a reason and to help develop a specific skill.
Ever the community-minded individual, Cannonball is an accomplished trail builder, he has been a long-time player with Trailcare and the Garigal Gorillas MTB club, pioneering the Fiv’er rides — a concept he admits to borrowing from the Canadian Toonie ride.
“It’s not just about building the gnarly downhill trails and the stuff that I like to ride anymore. I’m trying to build trails that help other people get better at riding and help build the community, and the mountain biking scene where we are. A lot of that’s come from when I was living in Whistler and seeing what they had there,” he says.
“It’s out of a personal want. Wanting to see the riding scene be better here, but also having people in my life that I want to see enjoying riding too and providing something that they will get into and enjoy,” he says.
With Trailcare, Cannoball has played a hand in making Bare Creek Bike Park happen and bringing Golden Jubilee from ruins to radness. You’ll regularly find him helping out with projects run by the likes of Dirt Art and Synergy Trails, he’s also led smaller projects around NSW, building public and private trails and will soon be launching his own trail-building outfit — Keystone Trails.
From the EWS to the Wyatt Ave Bike Park
In the last five metres of the final stage of Trans Tas in Derby, Hall had an off. Dislocating his hip and shoulder, it was the beginning of a long recovery that saw him off the bike for some time. When he was back and fighting fit, he hopped on a plane to the promised land of Whis-stralia to race the EWS stop.
“I’ll go back to Whistler whenever there is an EWS. I love it there, it’s loads of fun,” he says. “It feels different being in the Masters (35+) Category. They just shifted me to the Masters Category, and I can’t change it,” he laughs.
And with that, Cannonball is getting older. Only a few years ago, the firefighter living on Sydney’s Northern beaches was knocking down the door to chase the EWS as a privateer, crowdfunding and dirt bagging his way through, relishing the opportunity to race trails blind.
Now being bumped into the Masters Category, his priorities have changed. He and his partner Sheridan have a puppy named Walter and were hoping to start a family. It hasn’t been the easiest process, and after multiple miscarriages, they’re looking at fostering or adoption to make mini-shredders.
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Bare Creek, Golden Jubilee and building for beginners
Cutting his teeth building the infamous Grove and a few other spots in Sydney, a few years later, Cannonball found himself living in Arvada, Colorado. Working in a bike shop, Lee McCormack — who literally wrote the book on building pump tracks — walked in one day looking for folks to help build a pump track in a small town outside Boulder.
That chance meeting led to McCormack bringing Hall onto his crew to build pump tracks at Sea Otter; he would go on to work on slopestyle courses for Crankworx and the Teva Mountain Games with the likes of Kyle Ebett.
“It was really neat working with those guys and sort of guinea pigging some of the features and saying, “ok, we need to make this shorter or longer.” I certainly wasn’t the best at slopestyle tricks, but I could understand the jumps and how they worked, and flow from building the dirt jumps early on — that roller coaster feel and inertia,” he says.
Back home, Cannonball continued to remotely design pump tracks for McCormack and helped out where he could to give folks high-quality riding around his Sydney and building the local riding community.
“A big thing is always trying to think about whether there is a particular person that’s going to be able to enjoy these trails. The riding is really hard in Sydney because we’ve got such technical terrain with the Sydney sandstone and the rock shelves. There are very few areas that aren’t built out that are flat enough to build a gentle cross-country loop,” he says.
After working with a number of councils around Sydney to deliver mountain biking infrastructure, the Northern Beaches Council came to Trailcare with a concept to build something in the community for kids and beginners.
Working in collaboration with the Council, Trailcare took their preliminary design and improved it. Then working with the Council Landscaping team, helped to realise the park.
“The Council Landscape team was in there pretty much full-time moving materials as we worked out where we wanted the start hill and the next corner. They brought all the material in, put the drainage in, did all the soft scaping, and made it look awesome. We just put in the alignment and the final shaping to sort of glue it all together,” he says.
Wyatt Ave | A real-life PMBIA instructor workbook
Hall had just completed PMBIA level one and level two courses and has been coaching some youngsters. But this course has also profoundly impacted his approach to trail building.
“Understanding the different levels of riders and what their needs are, and what their capabilities are, has really helped in the step-by-step process you go through in teaching someone how to do drops, or how to do wheelies, or ride steep rocky terrain,” he says. “It really opened my eyes to say ok, cool, you’re building a green trail; this is the level it needs to be.”
And so, looking at Wyatt Ave, they literally started from one end and moved across the park to create progression based on the skills you’d be teaching to kids and beginners.
“There are some little skinnies for training balance; we put in a climbing trail section that had a few different technical features in that they could experience. On the way down, we put in little rock rolls, a little rock staircase. There are some small drops into little table tops and a little step up with a bridge between the takeoff and landing so you could roll it and still be safe,” he says.
There was a method to this madness, and everything you find at Wyatt Ave, and its location on the hill has been specifically placed to help the kids gain the proper technique — quite a feat in such a limited space.
“It’s also kind of the perfect length. It’s not so long the kids get worn out, but it’s also short enough that they can get back to the top really quickly. It’s kind of in that happy place where they get a teaser and get excited, so they are willing to race back to the top. They kind of get stuck in the loop of going around and around,” he laughs.
For Cannonball, trail building is a creative outlet, and despite it being arduous work, he tells us it doesn’t really feel like work. Whether it be flagging alignments out in the bush, or shaping a jump line, for Hall, that is his happy place.
It’s a really good creative outlet. It’s problem-solving and trying to work out how you can make something flow without much pedalling or braking or how to get a feature to work. Even if it’s just getting out in the bush and trying to find all the really cool waterfalls of views — all those little reveals you can have along the way — I love it,” he says.
Beyond the number of kids there every afternoon, on the surface, Wyatt Ave may just look like the extension of a school playground. But scratch through that top layer of dust, and you’ll find a meticulously planned park, with features designed to build skills towards a specific goal. You’ll find construction techniques and design philosophy that’s also been used at Bare Creek and Jubes — and even some which are likely to appear at these parks down the line. With that closer inspection, you realise that this isn’t just some skills park thrown together as an afterthought, it’s a pretty special piece of infrastructure that’s going to lay the foundation for some pretty sick riders.
Photos: Olly Crew / @ollycrwmedia