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“If you’re in Pinellas, you suffer.”
That’s how SWAMP Mountain Bike Club (SWAMP) Executive Director Pat Sanchez describes the reality for mountain bikers in Pinellas County, Florida — a peninsula hemmed in by Tampa Bay and largely cut off from the state’s best trail systems. The county’s nearly one million residents have had to drive 45 minutes to an hour just to reach a decent trailhead, and with traffic, that can balloon to two hours each way.
But SWAMP is about to fix that. The club is putting the finishing touches on the first-ever bike park and trail system in Pinellas County, located at Lake Seminole Park. The project is planned in three phases, with up to 10 miles of singletrack on the table, and phase one — packed with jumps, berms, and flow — is nearly complete.
SWAMP has been building trails around Tampa for nearly 30 years
“SWAMP is about 30 years old,” Sanchez told us. “It was originally just a group of rogue riders that decided that they didn’t want to ride their pavement bikes, and they started cutting trails.”…