Devon Bike Park

$25,000 would help Devon as a community to get active because it will help develop our new Mountain Bike Skills Park and town branding initiative. The main idea of our new title - Bike Town, Alberta - is to get community members active and having fun and to highlight all that we have to offer cyclists in Alberta. As a fifteen year old, I joined the bike club at my school-Riverview Middle School-to get more involved in this sport because it is so interesting. We started out as a few kids in a bike club riding mountain bikes, learning bicycle repair and maintenance and building technical riding features (with the guidance of our teacher, Mr. Haugjord, who helped us along the way to getting this bike park approved). Mr. H helped us prepare a proposal for our town council to develop the park. The group photo is of some of us going to town council (courtesy of The Devon Dispatch). Our Mayor and town councilors said our presentation was best prepared they had seen and that it was and the best attended town council meeting ever. Our dream is much closer to becoming a reality as the town agreed we need a bike park here in Devon. From this experience, I have learned that through hard work and dedication as a community and as an individual you can achieve great things like we have with the approval of a bike park. It’s a great feeling knowing that you are helping your community become stronger and that we can show that we can get anything done if we work together. Mr. Haugjord has even allowed me use social class to work on this project and offered to give me credit for it. It definitely fits with what we are learning in Social Studies 9 as we are learning about political parties, taxation, and government spending on social, economic, and cultural programs. Though we have some excellent trails in our beautiful river valley, we are otherwise limited for mountain biking options. We have a bmx park at one of our local schools and although it was nice for the town to put one in several years ago, it is not very well designed and somewhat unsafe. We think the $25,000 dollars would be helpful in building us a new and better bike park so we can live up to our title of Bike Town. It will also encourage kids and adults alike to get out of the house. It is a great way for beginners to get into mountain biking as well as some of us more experienced riders to have fun and progress our mountain bike skills, as a lot of people are getting into the sport. Mountain biking is a great way to get into shape and just have fun with friends and get along with other riders. A bike park can bring together a community socially and get them more active. Life isn't all about X-box for young people, is it? We need to get them outside, active and enjoying riding in the fresh air. The park will also bring people from the entire Edmonton capital region which will benefit our community as well. The $25,000 would help offset the cost of building the bike park, which is around $90,000 to $100,000. Devon needs a facility like this to help this sport progress and develop as it is a wonderful sport to get into. We need a safe place to ride and to develop our skills in the rapidly developing and wonderful sport of mountain biking. Presently, we have kids trying to jump off of church steps and drop off of ledges right next to main roads here in our town. We also have kids riding around town and interfering with traffic and pedestrians. In most communities that have bike parks, mountain biking becomes almost as big a sport as hockey or lacrosse. We believe that a bike park will help our passion towards mountain biking and the fun it gives kids and adults. We think Devon needs $25.000 dollars to help us build a bike park to keep kids safe and active around our community. Please choose Devon (Bike town), Alberta for the Kraft Celebration Tour!