PORTLAND, OR (BRAIN) Tuesday May 29 2012 8:56 AM MT—The Lumberyard, the first indoor mountain bike park west of the Mississippi, has opened for business. A launch party with pro riders and a vendor expo is planned for 3-9 p.m. June 9.
“This has been a long time coming, and it’s amazing to see it finally become a reality,” said Lumberyard co-founder Michael Whitesel.
The Portland park’s first phase, 48,000 square feet housed in a former bowling alley, contains beginner and intermediate riding features, including a pump track, cross country-style loop, a retail shop and an event room for hosting parties and meetings. The park was designed by Joe Prisel, designer of the Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park in Cleveland, Ohio.
Phase two is slated for an early July completion, and will include a full restaurant and bar and an area designed for children up to age 6. The final phase will see the addition of a 20,000-square-foot steel “barn” with 40-foot ceilings that will house advanced/expert features, including a foam pit, resi ramp and downhill trail with rock gardens, drops and step-downs.
“Portland is bike friendly as far as commuting goes and being an active cyclist, but recreation is pretty tough. You’re driving an hour-plus to get to a trailhead when the weather is nice. And then, of course, in the Pacific Northwest we’ve got a pretty dark, rainy, long winter,” Lumberyard co-founder Will Heiberg recently told BRAIN.
Rentals of bikes, helmets and safety pads are available, but Heiberg isn’t interested in becoming a bike seller, preferring instead to partner with the city’s rich IBD community.
“Since there are close to 80 bike shops in Portland, we don’t want to be selling bikes here. We want to push those bike sales back to the local bike shops. Same thing for a lot of bike maintenance and repair. If you’re riding here and something breaks and we can repair it on site, we’ll do that. But if you’re looking for anything more extensive—like a shock rebuild—we want you to be taking that back to the local bike shop,” he said.
“The idea behind that is that we want all the shops to be promoting and pushing their clients back to the Lumberyard.”
