Extra Mile Trail Building to construct new Queenstown Bike Park Trail

Back in August we brought you news that Skyline in Queenstown were beginning the planning process of adding a new trail to the network of tracks on the face of Skyline hill, better known as the Queenstown Bike Park. Well as of this week it’s official that Queentsown-based company Extra Mile Trail Building have won the contract and have already begun work on the new trail that will connect the Hub at the mid-point of the park with the end of the Traverse track, almost at the Gondola base station. Tom Hey, the main man behind Extra Mile is excited about the new trail and what it will add to the bike park “I’m stoked to be back building on the Skyline hill again. The new trail will open up more options from halfway and provide a real fun way to get back to the gondola without any uphill.”
While Skyline were waiting for tenders to come in, Queenstown trail building legend Nathan Greenwood guided a 20 tonne digger and its driver down the loosely proposed route and cleared a bunch of impassible obstacles like this massively steep section near the bottom of the trail. You can see a tonne (well, 20 tonnes) of work has gone into clearing and stabilising the route.

If you’ve been to Queenstown to ride recently you will have no doubt ridden Extra Mile’s handiwork. The insanely popular Rude Rock trail at the base of Coronet Peak is their work as is the new Lake Hayes asphalt pump track and the annual Teva Slopestyle course in downtown Queenstown. But Extra Mile’s work experience and involvement is a global affair, with recent projects including the much praised slopestyle course at the Colorado Freeride Festival as well as working on many of the industry’s biggest films. Extra Mile worked closely with Anthill on their film Not Bad and has worked extensively with Freeride Entertainment and John Cowan over the years. Tom has been on the Crankworx build crew both in Whistler and Colorado for many years and has also on past Red Bull Rampage builds. To say he’s qualified is a gross understatement! You can view Extra Mile’s extensive resume here.

For the build, Extra Mile have also enlisted Rotorua based trail builder Adam King of Empire of Dirt who worked with Tom in the Whistler bike park about six years ago. “We both have a passion for biking and trail building and we thought we would combine our forces to create something cool that people will love to ride. We are building a grade 2-3 flow style trail, with some jump options and some bermy sections that link up real well; it will be machine built and relatively wide but fun as hell to appeal to a wide audience. Imagine a marriage between Rude Rock and Rotorua’s new Challenge Trail!“

Work has already begun for Tom and the Extra Mile build crew, and you can follow their progress on the Extra Mile Facebook Page here. The official scheduled date of completion is the 20th of December.