Wisconsin Mountain Biking: La Crosse Community Trail Farm Project Guide

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The Community Trail Farm Project in La Crosse, Wisconsin represents a $6 million investment in Midwest mountain biking infrastructure. This comprehensive guide covers the trail development, Wisconsin’s mountain biking landscape, and what makes the Driftless Region a premier cycling destination.

La Crosse Mountain Bike Trails: From Farm to Flow

La Crosse sits in the shallow of Wisconsin’s Driftless Region, a geological oddity that escaped the last ice age, leaving behind a landscape of deep valleys and knife-edge ridges. It’s a river town with a split identity—part college hub where students drift between bars with names like The Library and The Study Hall, part bluff country basecamp where hunters and hikers trade routes over coffee, part decaying dairy corridor where barn wood silvers in the sun. Here, in this confluence of cultures, you wouldn’t expect to find one of the most ambitious trail development projects in the Midwest. But expectations, like topography, can be deceiving.

Just outside the city center, on land where Holstein hooves once compressed clay, a former dairy farm nestled between ridgelines and river flats is undergoing metamorphosis. A different kind of agricultural product is taking root: trail.

Community Trail Farm Project Details

Key Features:

• 200 acres of purpose-built mountain bike trails
• $6 million total investment
• Singletrack for all skill levels (beginner to advanced)
• Pump track and skills zones
• Adaptive cycling loops
• Hiking trails
• Future cross-country skiing trails
• Conservation easement protecting land permanently

The Community Trail Farm Project represents a vision to transform retired pasture into what locals hope will become a progressive, inclusive mountain biking destination. It’s not merely a park; it’s a reclamation—of land, of purpose, and of how we conceptualize outdoor recreation in the upper Midwest. The weathered red barn still stands sentinel. But instead of housing hay bales and milking equipment, it will frame trailhead maps and bike racks, a cathedral of conversion.

Led by ORA Trails, a nonprofit anchored in La Crosse, the project reaches beyond simply building berms and jumps. The land has been placed under conservation easement, preserving it permanently for public use—an agricultural heritage translated into recreational legacy. Its design includes features for all skill levels, designed not around the obvious slope of the hill, but around the more subtle curve of community need.

“We want to create a place where people come to ride, but stay for the experience—the nature, the people, the sense of place,” says one project leader. In another context, such a statement might sound aspirational, disconnected from reality. But here it’s becoming terrain-truth, as trails thread through former hayfields and trail builders replace farmers as the primary stewards of this small patch of Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Trail Building: Progressive Trail Design Partnership

To manifest this transformation from dairy to descent, ORA Trails partnered with Progressive Trail Design—the same craftspeople behind Arkansas’ acclaimed Coler Mountain Bike Preserve—bringing national-level trail architecture to Wisconsin’s limestone spine. Unlike many gravity-oriented projects built around existing ski resort infrastructure, the Community Trail Farm has no chairlifts, no pre-existing framework. Just elevation, imagination, and a stubbornness that feels quintessentially Midwestern.

Trail Construction Features:

• Flow trails with progressive difficulty
• Beginner-friendly green routes
• Advanced technical features and drops
• Skills areas for learning
• Sustainable trail design
• Year-round accessibility

This is grassroots gravity in its purest form. Flow here isn’t just a trail category—it’s a developmental principle. The design links beginner lines with advanced drops through thoughtful intersections, curates scenic detours for hikers seeking contemplation rather than adrenaline, and carves contour where cows once compacted soil into a surface more similar to concrete than dirt.

Funding and Timeline: Funding has materialized from a patchwork of grants, private donors, and outdoor infrastructure programs—a financial strategy as varied as the terrain itself. The trail farm is designed as a year-round space—with Nordic skiing in winter, wildflower viewing in spring, and racing events in fall. That kind of seasonal resilience is more than planning; it’s cultural insulation for a region where weather doesn’t just influence recreation—it dictates it.

“We’re treating this as a long-term investment in health, tourism, and ecological stewardship,” project leaders explain. “This isn’t about importing mountain culture—it’s about growing something here, in our own terrain, on our own terms.”

Midwest Mountain Bike Trails: Wisconsin’s Growing Network

The Community Trail Farm isn’t attempting to outshine the rest of Wisconsin’s trail menu—it’s completing it. Within a weekend’s drive, riders can sample:

Blue Mound State Park

• Rugged limestone outcrops
• Technical climbing and descents
• 40+ miles of trails
• Located near Madison

CamRock County Park

• Fast, flowing singletrack
• Former quarry setting
• Beginner to intermediate difficulty
• Cambridge, Wisconsin

Kettle Moraine State Forest

• Serpentine climbs through glacial terrain
• 9-mile main loop
• Advanced technical sections
• Multiple trailheads and access points

Each system offers a different dialect in the same dirt language. The Trail Farm adds a new chapter—one rooted in community access, infrastructural thoughtfulness, and adaptive inclusivity. While it won’t physically connect to these established systems, it reinforces the idea of Wisconsin as more than just flyover territory for riders headed toward more vertical destinations.

Kettle Moraine State Forest: The Shape of Memory

The mention of Kettle Moraine—that’s where the memories start.

My first encounter with those trails came during the summer after my freshman year of college. A convoy of rusting cars with cracked Yakima racks rolled north on Interstate 94, our vehicles stuffed with convenience store nutrition and youthful overconfidence. We were all slightly hungover, moderately sunburnt, and entirely unprepared for what awaited. I straddled a sky-blue GT Tequesta, the same machine that would later accompany me on more sophisticated adventures

Something took root that afternoon—something that wouldn’t flower until years later, after experiences in places with more famous contours.

After a summer working in Jackson and a stretch living in Tahoe City, where mountains announce themselves without subtlety, I returned home to Northern Illinois. The prodigal cyclist, I came back to those same trails with a Diamond Back Vertex TR and my friend John. With full-time jobs we established a rhythm: Fridays we’d golf, but Saturdays were reserved for dirt. We’d drive across the border into southern Wisconsin and hammer the nine-mile loop at Kettle, then race back to the general store in La Grange for a six-pack of Anchor Steam. Cracked lips, tired legs, the mingled perfume of beer sweat and trail dust. It became ritual—equal parts fitness test, therapy session, and tribute ride.

John’s gone now (as is Anchor Steam), but his presence remains embedded in those trails. I still sense him when I think about those Saturdays and the Kettle loop. Especially the climb we nicknamed “Old Whitey.”

That notorious uphill section near the end of the nine-mile loop was our personal nemesis—a steep, challenging stretch distinctively covered in white peat gravel that gave the climb its nickname. It was unforgiving. This slanted slab demanded everything—lungs, legs, balance and humility. Sit too deep and you’d wheelie out. Stand too tall and you’d lose traction. You had to hover in that just-right posture of fatigue and defiance, like balancing on the edge of an insult. Most days it beat us. But the ride back to the parking lot always felt like victory, regardless.

Driftless Region Biking: Wisconsin’s Unique Terrain

What connected those personal experiences on established trails to the emerging Community Trail Farm wasn’t immediately obvious to me. But then it surfaced: mountain biking in Wisconsin has always carried an underdog’s backbone. The terrain here is shaped more by glacial retreat than tectonic drama—rolling ridges, kettle holes, and trails that twist not for spectacle, but necessity. You don’t ride here to capture selfies from sweeping vistas. You ride here to find flow where geology didn’t obviously provide it.

This reality connects directly to what’s happening at the Community Trail Farm. They aren’t importing a model; they’re inventing one—a distinctly Midwestern template built on accessibility, ecological consciousness, and multi-seasonal utility. Where a weathered barn becomes a trailhead and a fallow field becomes flow trail. Where trail construction isn’t just recreation infrastructure—it’s economic and cultural investment.

The project doesn’t merely move dirt. It shifts narrative. It suggests that Wisconsin can be—and perhaps always was—a mountain biking state, just with a different definition of “mountain.”

Places like Kettle Moraine taught us how to ride with what we had. The Community Trail Farm shows us what we might build with what we’ve learned.

Wisconsin Outdoor Recreation: Planning Your Visit

Getting There:

• La Crosse is accessible via Interstate 90
• 3 hours from Twin Cities
• 4 hours from Milwaukee
• Commercial flights available to La Crosse Regional Airport

When to Visit:

• Spring (April-May): Wildflowers, mild temperatures, possible mud
• Summer (June-August): Peak riding conditions, warm weather
• Fall (September-October): Spectacular colors, crisp air
• Winter (November-March): Cross-country skiing, snowshoeing

Nearby Amenities:

• Local bike shops for repairs and rentals
• Variety of accommodation options
• Restaurants and breweries in downtown La Crosse
• Additional hiking and outdoor activities

Trail Development Impact: Economic and Environmental Benefits

The Community Trail Farm represents more than recreational infrastructure. Economic impact studies from similar projects show:

• Increased tourism revenue
• Job creation in outdoor recreation sector
• Property value improvements
• Environmental conservation through land preservation
• Community health and wellness benefits

The Future of Wisconsin Mountain Biking

The Community Trail Farm isn’t trying to be revolutionary. It’s simply practical—giving people a place to ride that fits the land it occupies. Through Wisconsin’s dramatic seasons, the trails will adapt: packed snow in winter, tacky dirt in spring, hardpack in summer, leaf-covered in fall. No grand promises, just good riding.

What matters is what’s being built: a system that acknowledges Wisconsin’s particular terrain and works with it rather than against it. Not every trail needs to drop a thousand feet to be worth riding. Sometimes, the challenge is in finding flow where flatness seems to rule.

And somewhere, not all that far away, that white gravel climb we nicknamed still waits on the Kettle Moraine circuit. Maybe not as imposing as memory painted it. Maybe just challenging enough to remind you why you ride.

Bring a six-pack for afterward. The trails will still be there tomorrow.