Cottonwood Canyon Mountain Bike Trail suffers setback

The Wyoming Legislature modified a budget amendment for the project, funding for which now would require a 50-50 match

The much-anticipated Cottonwood Canyon Mountain Bike Trail System east of Lovell has run into a roadblock in the form of a declined funding package by the Wyoming Legislature.

Announced on April 17, 2025, at a public meeting at the Lovell Community Center that included myriad supporters from both the public and private sectors, the trail system was billed as having the potential to be the finest trail system in the Rocky Mountain West, a project that would bring recreation dollars to the Lovell area. But now the project is on hold, Town of Lovell administrator Jed Nebel announced at a Lovell Town Council work meeting Tuesday.

Although studied and planned for months before, the project was essentially launched during a gathering at the community center in April that included multiple entities including major backer Wyoming Pathways, the Bureau of Land Management, consultant Pointe Strategies of Colorado, the Town of Lovell and a variety of mountain bike enthusiasts from the region.

An initial discussion had been held in March of 2024 to discuss mountain biking and other recreational opportunities in the area.

Some 40 people attended the meeting nearly a year ago, and since that meeting, Nebel and the Town of Lovell have been working with the BLM on the National Environmental Policy Act review process.

“We’ve met with them, boots on the ground,” Nebel said. “We met with every one of their ‘ologists,’ their archeologists, paleontologists, the biologists, their horticulturists, and we have hammered out what the cost of the environmental survey is going to be. BLM is going to handle everything in house with the exclusion of paleontology and archeology, and we’ll need to contract that out.”

The NEPA survey is expected to cost around $85,000, and while the town will pay for the bulk of it, Nebel hopes other entities like Big Horn County and others will chip in. Nebel said the town had hoped the NEPA survey would be paid by the newly formed Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Trust Fund, but the fund administrators said the fund cannot pay for an environmental survey.

Nebel said the trust fund hasn’t built up enough money since its formation to pay for the construction phase of the trail system, so the town was hanging its hat on a direct appropriation from the Legislature in the ongoing 2026 Budget Session, seeking funding for the estimated $1.2 million project as a budget amendment.

“We were looking for the $1.2 million essentially to fund the whole thing, since it’s a regional project and it’s good for tourism and recreation of Wyoming,” Nebel said.

The Wyoming Senate approved the budget amendment as part of the 2026-28 biennium budget, but the House of Representatives did not by three or four votes, Nebel said, with Rep. Dalton Banks, R-Cowley, collapsing on the floor of the House with the flu on February 21 while in the process of promoting the project.

“Dalton couldn’t even vote because he was in an ambulance,” Nebel said. “He collapsed explaining our project.”

“He was answering the questions right before the vote. It was his last turn,” Mayor Tom Newman said. “The poor guy went down, and then his vote couldn’t count because he wasn’t there.”

The issue went to a joint conference committee, and the committee formed a budget amendment for $800,000 but not specified for the Lovell bike trail project, making it a competitive funding source statewide and requiring a 50 percent match. That version of the project was set in stone with the passage of the budget last Friday.

At first town officials were excited because they were led to believe that the committee was putting in a budget amendment for $800,000 specific to the Cottonwood Canyon project, with the town asked to come up with the remaining $400,000, but that turned out not to be the case, essentially placing the project on hold for now.

Asked what the next step is, Nebel replied, “We don’t know. We’re waiting to see. I mean, it’s if we can find the money to do a $600,000 match, then we can construct the trails.”

They kept saying, ‘This is an impoverished county. It’s an impoverished county. An impoverished county. Well, yeah, and if you come up with the money and go for one, for one, you have up to $800,000. How the heck are we going to come up with that kind of money? You know, it was almost like, hey, we gave you something, but not really, you know. I’d rather they just said no.”

And yet the Legislature funded the proposed shooting complex in Cody and moving the pro rodeo hall of fame from Colorado to Cheyenne to the tune of millions of dollars, Nebel said.

If developed, the Cottonwood Canyon Mountain Bike Trail System would be developed on the western flank of the Big Horn Mountains to the east of Lovell in the area of the canyon visible from Lovell and known as the “heart of the mountain.”

As explained in the meeting last April, the phased trail system would include more than 26 miles of trails coming out of Cottonwood Canyon and branching out in multiple directions from there. The system would include primarily beginner and moderate levels of difficulty but also some advanced trails, as well.

Michael Kusiek of Wyoming Pathways, an advocacy organization that works to facilitate recreation projects, said at the April meeting, “I’ve been mountain biking since the ‘80s, have been working on trails since the ‘90s, and this is where I would go before I would go anywhere in Utah or Colorado from now on for full-year riding, no doubt.”