REI Grant Award + Ewing Advanced Trail Features

I wanted to share some exciting news with you and keep you abreast of what CITA board is working on - and invite you to join us and help make this a reality.

The long and short of it is we’re going to be putting the “Advanced” in Ewing Park’s “Advanced Trail”. Based on the 2014 naming of the trail, you can surmise this concept has been brewing for some time. Advanced Trail has always been intended as a progressive rider's playground with natural and built features such as wooden rollers, wooden and natural berms, rock gardens, and more.

We were recently awarded REI’s 2018 community partnership grant at their presentation event. During that time we were able to share our story and present the ideas for progressive trail features.

The grant award of $8,000 enables us to get this project started and off the ground.  We currently have a conceptual plan and starting inventory of features.  Our next steps are working with our land manager, the City of Des Moines Parks and Recreation to finalize details around signage, risk mitigation, feature placement, and so on.

Once we have their approval, we will start acquiring materials and building.  We aim to build a majority of the features locally and also buy some pre-fab features.  Part of that building process includes utilizing volunteers for installation, some construction, and whatever else we can help out with.

I invite you to reach out and let us know if you’re interested in helping - we can use all the help we can get.  You don’t need to have construction or building experience.

Our quotes and cost estimates for the Advanced Features project were targeted around the grant amount of $8k - and that is what we were awarded.  This is an excellent starting point.  It will allow us to put in the appropriate filter features, signs, add natural and built features onto the trail, and definitely provide a unique and progressive riding experience to anything else we have in the area.

If you would like to have us contact you when the dirt starts to fly please contact us and we'll add you to the list of interested builders. However, I will certainly add that getting involved financially would allow us to go above and beyond our initial plans. If you are willing and interested in donating toward this project we would greatly appreciate it. We would love to make the rock garden awesome, and we'll always need some funds allocated toward ongoing maintenance of the features.

With all these words, you may still be wondering exactly what this might look like.  View the presentation that was shown - starting on page 8 you will see visual examples of what I’m talking about.

I think you’ll find that this is a super exciting project for Des Moines. I again invite to you get involved in helping us make this happen, even if your involvement is getting out there on your bike and trying something new and riding something you never thought you could!

If you’d like to donate, we’re a 501c3 non-profit, and you can donate here.

Just a reminder of who YOUR CITA board members are:

Aaron Vance - President
Zach Bonzer - Vice President
Michael Olson - Secretary
Brian Swanson - Treasurer
Ben Brommel
Rob Cook
Joel Donaghy
Matt May
Jared Morford
Andre Rethman
She Rossetti

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to seeing you out on the trails!

Aaron
CITA President

Link: 2018 Grant Presentation PDF