A new partnership looks to improve and maintain trails in Lethbridge's river bottom

LETHBRIDGE -

A new partnership in Lethbridge will look to improve and maintain paths within the city's river bottom trail network.

The City of Lethbridge has formally partnered with the Lethbridge Trail Alliance (LTA) to protect the coulee landscapes and maintain trails used for mountain biking and hiking.

"One of the key goals of our partnership with the Lethbridge Trail Alliance is to utilize their position in the community to really help share that messaging of sticking to those existing trails," said Andrew Sommerville, parks planning manager with the city.

While formal talks between the LTA and city began in 2022, the need to maintain the trails started in 2015.

"When city parks were in a different management, equipment was found to be digging a path down to the creek in Six Mile Coulee to put a culvert in," said Ralph Arnold, president of the LTA.

"I talked to the equipment operator and he told me there's a plan to bulldoze the pathway through Six Mile Coulee."

After public pushback, the LTA was founded and began taking care of the trails in the river bottom.

"If you go to some of the popular trails, like the one down the middle of Six Mile Coulee, I bet during the day you'd see more than 100 people go down there," Arnold said.

The LTA will oversee trail maintenance, volunteer co-ordination and promotion of responsible use.

Those who ride the trails every day are looking forward to the improvements.

"We do see a lot of trail erosion from the rainstorms that come through and it wrecks the trails and you get ruts in the trails and as a mountain biker, that can trap you and increase the likelihood of crashing," said Marc Bombhof, who's been mountain biking along the network for years.

"If we do have regular maintenance and volunteers coming out to work on these trails and prevent erosion, then that will ultimately help with safety."

Earlier this summer, heavy rain and overuse damaged some of the paths.

"They can handle a lot of traffic," Arnold said.

"You go to Fernie or places like that, they have well-designed, machine-groomed trails and they can handle it, but when you get basically an old deer trail that's been modified for people and everything else, it doesn't necessarily handle it so well, but hopefully we can fix that."

More than 114 kilometres make up the trail network, with 31 kilometres marked as sanctioned single-track trails.

"It'll be easier for the public to know which trails to use. There are a lot of unsanctioned trails that we are aware of," Sommerville said.

"The other thing we're working on is the addition of wayfinding signs for the river valley trail network. We engage with the Lethbridge Trail Alliance to ensure we have those trails named properly with the proper difficulty ratings and designations and stuff like that as well."

With a plan to protect and grow the current network, Bombhof says the industry will be able to flourish in the city.

"Hopefully we can create these trail networks that will work for everybody," he said.

The partnership also formalizes the LTA as the key stakeholder in planning a sustainable network of trails going forward.