Invasive species like Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine were often favored for their qualities as timber crops. Trees were planted together in “coupes,” several acres in size, and “planted in straight lines for easy harvesting.” All of this resulted in forests with “low genetic diversity and really bad habitat for wildlife,” Astley explains. The uniform height of the trees blocked light from the forest floor, preventing other species from thriving.
If forests like this plantation are bad for biodiversity, Astley and his co-founders quickly realized, they were bad for their business. “Commercial forestry and mountain bike parks don’t mix well,” Astley says. Mountain bike trails are narrow dirt paths that are rarely more than a meter wide, and they don’t take up much actual surface area. “Proportionately, we only use about 1.5 percent of the site,” Astley explains. But the longest trail meanders for five kilometers through the forest, taking up a lot of space.
“If we cut down one tree, we have to close 10 trails for six months, and that has a huge impact on our business,” Astley says. In the 11 years the bike park was running, he says, NRW had managed to avoid cutting a single tree in the “core area” of Gethin Woodland—the 120-hectare zone where the current trails are located. “But then NRW started saying, ‘We can’t allow you to develop any more trails in the hills, because it will make it even more difficult to harvest wood.’” It was clear that something had to change, and actively returning the forest around the trails to its pre-planted state, or rewilding, seemed like the ideal solution.
Astley, who has a degree in zoology, says he’s always been “conscious about environmental issues. Morally, I think business has a role to play in fighting the problems we face, like climate change and biodiversity loss.” At the same time, Astley and his partners realized that a mixed forest made up of native species would be more resilient to a variety of threats that could threaten the park’s future.
“Back in 2013, before we started building the trail here, Phytophthora ramorum“There was a lot of larch on the site, probably around 30 percent. Luckily our predecessor in NRW removed it all just before we opened because they knew we couldn’t take on a site with so much dangerous dead wood,” he says. But similar businesses haven’t always been so lucky. “Revolution Bike Park in mid-Wales has been closed for over a year because the hills were being encroached upon by dead trees. Phytophthora ramorum“The whole hill had to be cut down,” Astley said.
Astley explains that mono-species forests, with their rows of trees, are not only more vulnerable to disease outbreaks, but also less resistant to wildfires. “Last July, there was a massive fire behind our hill, and the wind was blowing it towards us,” he says. “For about a week, the road up our hill was covered in smoke and the firefighters were dropping water from helicopters trying to put it out. It was really scary.” Astley says the more he thought about it, the more he and his partners realised that rewilding made sense, from both a business and an environmental perspective. Compared to current monocultures, natural forests “are much more resilient in every way,” he says. “We realised we had an opportunity to win on two fronts.”
