Riverton Bike Park Grand Opening next week!

The Riverton Trolley Bike Park Grand Opening & GPNEMBA Spring Social is coming up next Wednesday, May 14th. Celebrate this incredible new bike park and get your first laps on the dirt jumps, the flow trail, the pump track, the skills zone, and more! This will be an incredible event marking a step change in the Portland outdoor recreation landscape.

• Parking at either Hannaford’s at 787 Riverside St, Portland, ME or on Industrial Way. Portland Police will be helping folks cross Riverside St. safely to Riverton
• Ribbon cutting at 4:00
• The bike park will be open to the public for the first time around 4:30. Open riding after that with GPNEMBA volunteers directing traffic
• GPNEMBA Spring Social @ Battery Steele Brewing 6:00-8:00

GPNEMBA will be hosting its Spring Social at Battery Steele across the street from 6:00-8:00, with a FREE first pint for all GPNEMBA nembers! Battery Steele was a huge financial supporter of the new bike park, and we’re grateful to them for hosting. If you’re not already a GPNEMBA member, you can sign up during the event, and we’ll be revealing our 2025 plans for the first time.

RSVP today for the Riverton Bike Park Grand Opening & GPNEMBA Spring Social!

Tomorrow is really set to frig up your weekend (2″ of rain), so sadly we must declare all off-road trails unofficially closed. They ground is fully saturated, and about to get hosed again. Yes, it’s as annoying as sh*t. But yes, we’ve been doing our best in our all-volunteer trail crews to work on improving drainage so trails are rideable sooner. We’ve put in the hours already on many trails at East Windham, for example, elevating low points, piling rocks, building drains, and otherwise getting the water off the friggin’ trail (a fix to the above low point on Trail #1/E Line is incoming, FYI).

As far as regional trails that tend to do better in the wet, consider spots like Cape Elizabeth (Robinson Woods), many of the Portland Trails, and USM/Alden Hill in Gorham. However, none of them will be rideable until a few days into next week.

We’ll be exploring after this coming rain to see how area networks are fairing and provide better guidance to where to head to in the wetter parts of the year. If you’d like to contribute a field observation of your own, hit us up at portlandnemba@gmail.com once you’ve had a chance to explore!

Otherwise, if your tire is sinking in more than 1″, it’s time to turn around. Thanks for being patient! 

Spring is time to renew or start your GPNEMBA membership, and May is our membership month. Your membership supports our ability to get insured, run a website, buy gear for volunteers and, you guessed it, invest thousands of dollars a year into trail maintenance across the region, backed by nearly 4,000 hours of volunteer trailwork.

Membership also gets you some great discounts & benefits! Including:

• 20% off Highland tickets
• 30% off Trailforks Pro
• $10 off Cranmore & Loon Mtn bike park tickets
• 15% off any Dynamic Cycling Adventures clinics
• 20% off Pelli Bike Care products

And, thanks to a generous GPNEMBA donor, all new memberships will be MATCHED this month up to $1,000!

Given the timing and the generous match, consider becoming a GPNEMBA member today (list GPNEMBA as your primary chapter). Consider it your season’s pass and a commitment to raising the quality of riding across Greater Portland.
 

Our partners at Bicycle Coalition of Maine (BCM) are putting on a host of beginner & intermediate mountain bike courses this spring. These classes are designed to lay a foundational functional range of motion of your bike so that you can ride more varied and uneven terrain as you improve your bike balance. Courses are $50 each — consider for yourself or for the beginner rider in your life who’s needed a foundation to get out there and have a ball.

• Wednesday May 14th, 5:30-7:30 @ Weeks/Moody’s in Gorham
• Saturday May 24th, 2:00-4:00 @ Weeks/Moody’s in Gorham
• Wednesday May 29th, 5:30-7:30 @ Weeks/Moody’s in Gorham

BCM is also hosting an intermediate MTB clinic Saturday June 21st from 4:00-6:00. We’re grateful to them for putting on these clinics in support of riders just getting this radical sport.

Finally, I wanted to share this post from supporter Lindsay Currier on the great 207 Mountain Biking Facebook group. As Lindsey wrote in her post: “Had some rugged winter blues for a bit but climbed some literal mountains and now we are back to BIKES! Here is a little something that’s gotten me through many a rough patches. A special message from a very special lady of our very special bike community. (I have a lot more to share from my first week back on bikes, but first I must go biking). “🫶🤗🚵‍♀️

This is the mountain bike community at its best — connecting with each other on a human level, supporting our whole selves through the relationships that are built by a life on bikes. It’s the kind of community we aim to build here at GPNEMBA. So whoever you are, consider yourself enlisted in our mission to make this place RAD (period, end of story), and to make this community the most welcoming, supportive, and fun corner of the block to be on. I join Lindsay, Libby, and the rest of y’all in taking on the challenge.

See you on the trail,

Ryan Dunfee
GPNEMBA President