McCallum Park opens new mountain biking trails

It was a big weekend for the mountain bikers of Vestavia. For quite a while, it's been an uphill struggle to find a local trail for riders to practice.

However, on the chilly morning of Saturday, Dec. 16, all of that changed as a few dozen Vestavia leaders, locals and mountain bikers gathered just over the bridge at McCallum Park to witness the official opening and ribbon cutting celebration for the new mountain biking trails. 

Located on a hillside covered in trees behind Vestavia Hills High School, a dirt path now winds up and down the hill, with various jumps and forks for mountain bikers to practice on.

"It’s taken since 2014 and meeting with a lot of different folks to get this to happen," Tina Chanslor, who is president of the Birmingham Urban Mountain Peddlers (BUMP), coach of the Vestavia Hills Mountain Biking team and involved in other roles in the mountain biking community, said. 

"We are really excited for this because we will be able to practice here, kids will be able to come and ride," Chanslor said, "also kids who aren’t on the mountain bike team will be able to come and ride these trails and enjoy it with their families."

In 2014, she said, the kids were having mountain bike practice on the roads, which wasn't ideal and was cause for some stress. In an effort to making things better, they reached out to Michael Enervold, part of TrailVision LCC, to start the process of designing a trail, and the Vestavia City Council put forth some money to help get the project started. 

"It's a gem of a park," Enervold said. "[People are] going to be surprised and hopefully delighted."

The idea of this "pocket park," he said, is that the trails have variety and bikers can take different turns the next time they come around. Even though the new trail isn't very long at this point, there's a lot of texture and change in steepness to it, he said. 

"We’ve designed the trails so that you can have an experience like you might see at Oak Mountain or a larger state park, just in this tiny little pocket park," Enervold said. 

Doug Brown, who played a big role in ensuring the park was completed, said that this has really been a group effort, and happened largely because of the support of all the parents and various Vestavia organizations, including the Vestavia Hills Parks and Recreation Board and Foundation. 

"[The trails] are multipurpose," he said, adding that hikers and walkers can also enjoy it, and there is even a possibility that eventually people in the neighborhood can use some of it to walk to school. "We want to make the public more knowledgable and aware of what we got."

Eventually, Enervold said they plan to get rid of the privet, which is an invasive species, on the couple of acres beside the new trail and build a "little bike playground," he said. Currently, there's a little sampling of it, but he said that will most likely be phase two of the project. 

After community members spoke, Enervold led a walking tour of the new trails and explained some of the possible tricks mountain bikers could on various areas of the trail. Several members of the Vestavia Mountain Biking Team were there to check it out, along with their families. 

"Just think, this was land with nothing going on, but now we have beautiful trails," Brown said. 

McCallum Park is located at 3332 Rosemary Lane.