Manly Dam is one of the busiest bits of singletrack in Australia. Back in 2014, when Trailscapes did an upgrade, there were reports of up to 500 rides in a single day and about 150,000 per year.
What’s even crazier is the vast majority of what has become known as the Manly Dam loop, takes place on fire roads, public streets, and the grass behind people’s houses, not purpose-built mountain bike trails. Worse, you never actually see the Dam from the trail.
Since then, the mountain biking community on Sydney’s Northern Beaches has only grown, and the Dam — along with a number of the trails around it that may or may not be sanctioned — has continued to become more popular. But with that and a year of wet weather, the Dam loop is looking a bit haggard.
In a 2021 article in the now-defunct Northern Beaches Review, locals accused the council of leaving Manly Dam to rot, and noted that the lack of attention had left the trails eroded and dangerous. Unfortunately, the Northern Beaches Review was shuttered in 2022, but thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can find a version of that story here.
And so when we noticed the Northern Beaches Council had allocated 1 million AUD in its 23/24 budget, there was a bit of excitement. Considering that the first stage of Blue Derby was built with 3.85-million in funding, this is a big deal and is one of the most significant investments in mountain biking in Sydney.
“Manly Dam is such an important piece of mountain bike infrastructure in Sydney. Like it or loathe it; it’s one of the key mountain bike opportunities in that Sydney area. Any sort of commitment of that quantum is a great thing,” says Dirt Art head Simon French. “On a good day, a million-dollars achieves a lot for mountain bike infrastructure. It can also achieve very little if it’s not administered properly.”
Problems that need to be addressed at Manly Dam
The genesis of the Manly Dam loop is the same as most of the other riding spots in the area in that a professional trail builder didn’t construct it, nor was it built with permission.
The difference here is that the Northern Beaches Council — or rather Warringah Council at the time — decided to formalise some of this track, create a mapped loop and turned it into something they could proudly boast about on their website.
Because of its informal origins, it was never built to handle the up to 500 laps per day it reportedly receives, and there are some fundamental issues with the alignments.
“There is a trail that has a powerline easement above it, which causes all the surface runoff to channel straight onto the trail. It doesn’t matter what you do downslope from that, you’re still going to have all this water running down that trail every time it rains,” says Jason Lam from Dirt Art, who lives on the Northern Beaches and has conducted trail audits for the Council.
To remedy this section of trail, the options are an excessive amount of rock armouring or a raised platform.
It would be very easy for that money just to get sunk into putting patch jobs on things, and not actually achieving a better trail network for mountain bikers
“If you’re doing that, you have to question the viability of the alignment. It’s obviously not working, and that trail probably shouldn’t be there in a sustainability sense. In that case, you’d be better off realigning that whole section of trail. It would reduce the overall maintenance burden significantly and offer a better riding experience,” says Lam.
As it stands, whenever it rains, the Dam turns into a quagmire, and the trails need to be closed. However, because there are so many entry points onto the loop and no defined trailhead or start and end point, it’s impossible to enforce a closure in any meaningful way.
And as much as folks love to yell at each other online about riding when it’s muddy, people still go out on wet trails, which exacerbates the fundamental issues with sustainability.
In the past, the Council has employed what amounts to band-aid solutions to these fundamental problems.
“Like with what happened with the singletrack near Manning Street, the council have gone in and done some great work,” says Paul Lidgard from Trailcare, a group that advocates for and has played a role in the delivery of Bare Creek, Golden Jubilee and Wyatt Ave in recent years. “The problem is they’ve done the work on top of the existing trail, which is straight down the fall line, and it becomes a creek when it rains. There is no way to fix this trail without changing the alignment.”
At a practical level, the riding community generally agrees not much of Manly Dam is actually mountain bike trail.
Over the years, it seems there has been an apparent reluctance from the powers at be to address these fundamental issues, and the bandaid fixes have been the go-to. We can only speculate as to the reason for this, however the council has also been telling mountain bikers it would formalise the trails that connect the dam to Gahnia and Serrata in Bantry Bay for a decade. To date, those links are still not sanctioned.
“There is huge potential for that Manly Dam site, but it would be very easy for that money just to get sunk into putting patch jobs on things, and not actually achieving a better trail network for mountain bikers,” says French.
Getting to know the locals
Just recently, Trailcare conducted an informal survey of Northern Beaches mountain bikers to understand riders in the community better. This was not an exercise sanctioned by the Northern Beaches Council — or any government organisation or governing body for that matter — Trailcare was seeking to learn more about a portion of the community they advocate for.
Promoted through social media, the survey received 448 total responses. It’s not a massive sample size, but it provides insights into how people use the Dam and what local riders want.
Of the respondents, when asked how they usually ride the Dam, 57% of the 423 who answered this question said they always extend their ride using unsanctioned trails, 13% said they only ride trails marked by Council signage, and 37% said they sometimes extend their ride using Gahnia or Serrata.
Of those surveyed, 81% said the unsanctioned trails on the other side of Wakehurst Parkway are crucial to their enjoyment of Manly Dam. When asked what they’d do with 1-million AUD, 60.7% said they’d want to at least complete the loop so they don’t have to ride streets and fire trails, and 23.33% said to erase the whole thing and build a proper trail.
When asked about their priorities for the Manly Dam upgrade, 52% said their top priority was to make it a singletrack loop the whole way around.
Again, this is not a professionally conducted survey, and it was run by a trail advocacy group with a vested interest in the outcome of the upgrade, so take these results with a grain of salt. But it does provide an insight into what local mountain bikers are thinking.
“There have been various trail audits over the years, and the details of those audits are being kept confidential by Council — so we don’t know exactly what was recommended. But at a practical level, the riding community generally agrees not much of Manly Dam is actually mountain bike trail,” says Ward.
Arguably the biggest takeaway from this survey is that of the people who do ride at Manly Dam, they’re not riding the trails built by the council. Instead, they are crossing an extremely busy road to ride the trails on the other side of Wakehurst Parkway to avoid an extended section of fire road.
“The underlying push and expectation from the community, you at least want to get to the point where you’ve got a mountain bike trail from start to end. The tension is between this concept of saying, “Oh, there’s a million dollars to spend. Can we even reach that minimum expectation of having a mountain bike trail all the way around, and if not, why not?” says Ward.
In terms of trail formalisation and jumping through hoops, the Dam is probably the least complex example in all of Sydney
The Pipeline Active Transport Corridor
The other factor at play here is what’s being called the Pipeline Active Transport Corridor. To our knowledge, this is totally separate from the Manly Dam upgrade and, with that, the budget that’s been allocated.
Essentially this is a hard surface track that will follow the Sydney Water Pipeline from Beacon Hill to St Ives. On the surface level, more separated bike infrastructure is not necessarily a bad thing — especially because the current trail that follows the Pipeline becomes a bog at the slightest whisper of rain. However, this improved bike infrastructure may come at the cost of some existing unsanctioned trail.
This is kind of a stuck-between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place thing as these trails at risk aren’t supposed to be there in the first place, and yet they are extraordinarily popular — driving the wider point home about why the Northern Beaches need more sanctioned mountain bike trails.
Ward tells us this project is receiving quite a lot of resistance from inside the Northern Beaches Council area and beyond.
What could you build with a million dollars?
The Manly Dam Loop is far from perfect, which in all honesty, shouldn’t be a massive surprise given most of it is an informal trail from the 1990s that has a few band-aids pasted onto it.
We asked the folks from Trailcare and Dirt Art what they think is feasible.
Manly Dam is a bit of a unicorn in Sydney that it’s all controlled by one land manager. Given the budget is already allocated, it should be a relatively easy homerun for the Northern Beaches Council.
“In terms of trail formalisation and jumping through hoops, the Dam is probably the least complex example in all of Sydney. You’re not jumping between National Parks and Aboriginal Land Council and the Department of Education, and whoever else — it’s all one land manager. It has the potential to be an incredibly simple place to build good, high-quality, sustainable mountain bike trails,” says Ward.
For Ward, he believes the Northern Beaches Council has the opportunity to create the right asset for the community.
“That asset is a network of mountain bike trails that provides for beginners in addition to the current community of riders. At the moment, the Dam doesn’t do much at all to cater for beginners,” he says.
Ward also wants to see the trail start at the Dam’s existing infrastructure — where the car parking, toilets, and playground are located — and to get riders off the streets and the high-speed fire trails, as that’s where accidents happen time after time.
“You could do a whole lot with a million dollars if there is the willingness to provide an asset,” he says.
Lam also wanted to see the existing infrastructure utilised for mountain biking, as everything you’d associate with a good trailhead is already there. As he noted in one of the trail audits, it would also help to curtail folks riding when the trails are closed. He was also keen to improve the interactions between the user groups that recreate at the Dam.
“There’s a lot of conflict with the other user groups that use Manly Dam, and there is an extraordinarily diverse user group that shares Manly Dam. There’s a walking loop that sits within that and also uses a lot of the fire trail, which is also used by mountain bikers,” he says.
To achieve this, Lam tells us they suggested separating riders from other user groups, especially when they’re descending, in the trail audit submitted to the Council. This is a common tactic often employed where multiple user groups are sharing space, like the most recent update to kunanyi/Mount Wellington.
French had three main points of what could realistically be achieved at Manly Dam with this type of investment.
“It’s definitely not a lost cause. It just needs some careful planning,”
“Notwithstanding any of the environmental constraints, which there are some, and the quite extensive cultural and other issues that apply here, I think the key thing is you’re probably not going to get an agreement on a significantly large trail network. Given the volume of use, some more provision for alternative alignments within the network to disperse different rider abilities would be nice — even within the existing corridor,” he says.
“In our planning, we tried to address some of the problems with connectivity on the site — some of them are viable, some probably not, for a range of reasons. But we’re trying to make the loop continuous. And the final one is really trying to edit out the sections that are not working at all that are very hard to fix, and just replacing them with new sections of trail on appropriate alignments,” he says. “In a perfect world, you’d develop a brand new trail all the way around, but being realistic, that’s not going to happen. So it’s going to be a combination of some existing trails, some new trail, but just trying to replace as much of the trail that is fundamentally not working as possible.”
French noted that he and Lam laid all of this out in their most recent trail audit for the Council. That audit has not been made public.
“It’s definitely not a lost cause. It just needs some careful planning,” he says.
What does the Northern Beaches Council have to say?
The key voice in all of this that we haven’t featured yet is, of course, the Northern Beaches Council. They’re the ones tasked with managing this upgrade, and have been given the means to create something rad for the local community.
Prior to the million dollarydoos, the 22/23 budget allocated $50,000 AUD to put towards the upgrade, so we asked what it had been spent on.
A council spokesperson said, “Council has spent $25,000 of the available budget on environmental investigations and preliminary design and consultation.”
When asked what their plans were for the million, the Council Spokesperson told Flow the overall objective is to create the best mountain bike experience within the constraints of the Plan of Management, and plans to upgrade the trail through improvements to “surfaces, drainage and minor realignments that improve safety and environmental outcomes.”
We should note that the Plan of Management is about a decade old, and the Council says it has no immediate plans to update this document. This brings up an interesting quandary as in Links and Loops section of the Open Space and Outdoor Rec Strategy, it mentions sanctioning trails like Nemesis and Edward and closing others like Fatback.
“With Nemesis and Edwards (sic) it is proposed to integrate them into a future Plan of Management as part of the authorised mountain bike trail network,” the Council Spokesperson told Flow.
One of the key risks beyond the Dam itself is that if the million dollars is expended in Manly Dam and doesn’t achieve a great result, that’s one of the biggest spends on mountain bike infrastructure in Sydney for a long time and that posts a huge risk, and a huge problem for future investment.
In all fairness, this document is meant to cover the next 15 years, however if there is no motivation to update the current POM, so don’t hold your breath.
On that same note, we asked if the upgrade included anywhere you’d be able to see the dam. The Council Spokesperson tells us the trail permitted under the POM follows ridgetops and does not come in close proximity to the reservoir.
When it came to addressing the fundamental problems with some of the alignments, like the one below the powerline easement, Council said these sections would be investigated for realignment or upgrade to solve the issue.
Asked about completing the loop and removing the surface streets, fire road, and grass behind people’s houses, the Council Spokesperson said, “Council is planning some realignments such as the replacing of the current Manning St on-road section of trail with a single track through the park.”
“Council will shortly start constructing the Manning St realignment and upgrading of existing alignment trails whilst seeking environmental approval for any proposed realignment,” they continued.
The only question the Council did not answer was our inquiry about the number of riders who use the dam.
Final thoughts
With the answers from the Council — as vague as they may be — it seems they are at the very least aware of some of the fundamental issues with the Dam loop, and are looking at implementing some fixes. What those will look like, we have absolutely no idea.
But there are larger implications for how this upgrade is managed. The Dam is managed by its own department within the Northern Beaches Council. How they spend this money could colour outer Councils’ and land managers’ decisions to invest in mountain biking infrastructure.
“One of the key risks beyond the Dam itself is that if the million dollars is expended in Manly Dam and doesn’t achieve a great result, that’s one of the biggest spends on mountain bike infrastructure in Sydney for a long time and that posts a huge risk, and a huge problem for future investment,” notes French.
Ultimately this isn’t grant money or funding received from higher levels of government this is a line item that’s being paid for with rate payer’s money. To spend that money on more patch-up jobs, that kick the can down the road for a few years would be no better than tying it to a brick and throwing into the middle of the actual dam. The decisions about how this money is spent aren’t being made by folks who’ve had to win an election to earn their post, so if the money is spent poorly, it’s not like Northern Beaches locals have many levers available for accountability.