Cimarron Chacon and Her Unprecedented Work on St. George Trails

By Dave Sheldon
Mountain Flyer Magazine
Summer, 2006

During one of her first mountain bike outings to Moab, Utah, Cimarron Chacon joked to a friend that, "It would be cool to design trails for a living." Little did she know that four years later she would posses her dream job, working as a landscape architect for the Bureau of Land Management in St. George, located inthe southwest corner of Utah.

Chacon's nine-year run with the BLM began in 1997 when she was hired to create a Regional Trails Master Plan for Utah's St. George region, an area covering approximate 30,000 acres. The plan would include pedestrian, horse and cycling trails, both on and off-road. It was no light task and would end up incorporating 11 communities and multiple cities. In an even bigger plan challenge, Chacon would need to seamlessly blend the backcountry network within urban settings, allowing users to leave a trailhead, zip down Main Street on a paved bike path and then easily find more backcountry access on the other side of town.

Lucky for cyclists, Chacon's passion to ride is strong and her determination steely. Already her work has brought us the Hurricane Cliff and Bear Paw Poppy trail networks, Gooseberry Mesa and the extreme free-ride park known as the Red Bull Rampage area, just to name a few.

She also had a major role in establishing St. George's now annual Cactus Hugger Cycling Festival and the Zion Freeride Festival.

And there's more in store for the St. George area, particularly the Santa Clara River Reserve and Little Creek Mesa. The Santa Clara River Reserve will soon offer 62 miles of freshly minted trails and has been nominated for a national landscape planning award for its experienced zoning and preferred use concepts.

The Little Creek Mesa project is nearly done and represents an unprecedented partnership with the International Mountain Bike Association.

For its role, IMBA designed the trails with environmental clearances, complying with National Environmental Protection Agency regulations and essentially reducing the typical, lengthy lag time between planning and construction.

At 30,000 acres, the St. George region in western Utah extends across a monumental amount of terrain, and Chacon's work spearheading trail development in the area has been just as monumental, not to mention unprecedented.

What also makes her work successful is her understanding of the people who will use the trails. She always works with the idea that feedback from these users is critical to ensure the trails meet or even exceed their expectations.

To get to know cyclists better, Chacon is a regular visitor to Interbike, the national cycling trade show, and can be seen at most of the West's mountain bike festivals chatting with fellow riders. And she takes it all in, whether it is someone's passion for narrow, technical single-track, wide friendly paths or wicked drops with shattering consequences. How many other planners for the BLM ever did this?

Another of Chacon's precedent-setting philosophies is her development and design of preferred use trails, a new alternative to current multiple use trails.

With this philosophy, a trail is designed and built for a particular user group, based on the area's soils, terrain and planned experience.

Sometimes an analysis shows that more than one group can share a trail, but most often the trail is designed for a single user group: pedestrians get walking and hiking trails; equestrians get horse trails; and cyclists can have their own riding trails. As an obvious benefit, these types of trails limit conflict between users, since everyone has their own place to play.

This built-in regulation has been proven to work. After all, why would anyone ride on a horse path when they have a multitude of bike trails to choose from?

Another crucial reason to support preferred use trails and get away from the widely implemented multiple use trail method is to ensure that resources are preserved. Simply put, trails built and designed sustainably for bikes and used by cyclists show very little erosion, and the same is true of horse paths. But put both users on the same stretch of dirt, and things literally blow apart.

Local business owners also benefit from the world class St. George network, and this turned into local support for the trail network. The visitors attracted by the trails bring in good old cash-money.

When policy makers and community leaders saw the local economy growing as a direct result of the new and hassle-free trail system and the urban open space that went with it, they happily supported future projects and festivals.

Building preferred use trails is catching on. Chacon has taught courses on the subject and is now working on a book, which federal agencies and land advocacy groups will be able to reference when working up their own management systems and trails.

Chacon and her husband recently relocated to Tucson, Ariz., where she accepted a senior position in a private landscape architecture and environmental planning firm. Thankfully, her work as a trail systems designer is not over, as she will soon be working with the BLM on a spur of the Arizona trail and hopes to be involved with pieces of Tucson's Pima County trails master plan soon.

So if you ride in Tucson keep a lookout for Chacon aboard her trusty Specialized Enduro. I'm sure she'll be interested in what you have to say.