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Black Rock Mountain Bike Area
The Black Rock Mountain Bike Area is a destination recreation area in Polk County near Falls City on Oregon State Forest land. It was established in 2002 and has evolved over time with close collaboration between the Black Rock Mountain Bike Association (BRMBA) and the Oregon Department of Forestry’s West Oregon District and Recreation program.
The world-class mountain bike trail system at Black Rock exists and continues to be enhanced because of dedicated and passionate volunteers. You can visit the BRMBA Instagram or Facebook pages to see the trails in use – and the work involved in maintaining them. The results are awesome –and have inspired other projects such as the Fear and Loaming trail on the Tillamook State Forest (more on that in a future newsletter).
Photo credit: Ashlie Rene
Black Rock Visitor Use Monitoring
In March 2023, we received the results of a year-long pilot project at Black Rock Mountain Bike Area to understand visitor use patterns, spending and health benefits. We know intuitively that Oregon’s state forests provide great recreation opportunities, but we have lacked data that support effectively managing these sites. Information on the amount and character of visitor use is essential. The pilot project at Black Rock is a step toward developing scalable methods to collect this information across state forest lands. Here’s some of what we learned:
There were 4,655 annual visits to Black Rock Mountain Bike Area during the study
Hourly peaks in visitor use occur at 9:00 and between 11:00 - 12:00 at the ODF gate.
The trails that are the most popular with riders are Banzai Downhill and Sickter Gnar
Most visitors to BRMBA live in Oregon and are highly educated with a household income of >$100,000
overall recreation at BRMBA results in about$159,000 in trip-related visitor expenditures each year in nearby communities.
The State Forest Trust of Oregon played an instrumental role in driving this project by engaging OSU students to explore innovative visitor use monitoring approaches, recruiting the research team, and subsequently managing the overall project.
Methods: Over the course of 12 months, beginning in November 2021 and concluding in December 2022, the research team deployed automated counters, conducted in-person surveys, developed a community science program for visitors to submit information through a custom text-messaging chatbot, and gathered data from seven social media platforms. We believe that many of these tools could scale affordably to other state forest recreation areas.
The research team was comprised of scientists from Oregon State University, the University of Washington, and the USDA Forest Service who have expertise in recreation monitoring and methods for efficiently measuring and modeling visitor use at large numbers of recreation sites. If you would like more information on the study and future plans, please contact the project manager, Lorie Wigle, via the info@stateforeststrust.org mailbox.
