The landscape within the Columbia Valley, full of mountains, glaciers, rivers and lakes offers tremendous features of natural beauty as a draw to tourists and residents alike. It has excellent hiking, biking, paddling, and motorized trails that already exist on the landscape, linking people to many of the points of interest. With the warm dry weather the valley experiences and the early season snow melt, the valley bottom has an advantage of being able to market the shoulder season over many other areas.
Our vision for the future of trails in and around each community is to have a logical central hub from which trails and facilities radiate. Locating a central hub close to amenities like visitor centers, bike shops, and food and beverage businesses allows for a seamless flow from arrival to information gathering, recreating, and food/drink. The central hub is also an important welcoming stage to the visiting mountain biker or hiker. The trailhead kiosk should have a map on it that outlines the trail loops, lengths and difficulty of the loops, and relevant points of interest along the loops, allowing a trail user to plan their route.
In summary, we envision:
- Creation of Central Hubs for the staging of hikes and rides, provide consistent signage
- Connecting existing trail systems to Community business centers
- Reducing the reliance on vehicles to drive to trail heads
- Build trailhead facilities at all trails and perform regular maintenance of existing trail heads
- Creation of more trails for learning how to mountain bike and progressive difficulty stacked loops
- Creation of more small loops close to communities
- Amalgamation of intersections to decrease decision points
- Providing adequate quantity of challenging trails to prevent rogue trail construction