Edmonton river valley users may be seeing more closure signs when they go to walk their favourite paths as dozens of trails have eroded.
The City of Edmonton blames most of these closures on significant rainfall in 2019 and 2020. High river levels earlier this year also damaged several trails.
The Edmonton Mountain Bike Alliance has volunteered close to 700 hours this year to help maintain trails.
“The river bank has gotten so moist that it’s actually starting to move and it’s actually failing in sections,” EMBA’s Kent Zucchet said.
“The slumping has caused several trails in the city to fail fairly catastrophically.”
Zucchet said while they could always clean up deadfall and do other minor work, this is the first year the city is letting EMBA also do work to help with water flow on the trails.
Zucchet said the work will prevent water from sitting in a spot for too long — creating holes or slumping.
READ MORE: Some Edmonton trails closed due to high water levels on the North Saskatchewan River
Edmonton has about 160 kilometres of trails.
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“They let us do about a third of the inventory — maybe a quarter of the trails in the city — so allowing us to do more trails would be excellent,” Zucchet said.
In an email to Global News, the city said damage of this nature is addressed through trail renewal as the complexity exceeds what can be managed through routine maintenance.
The city also said it is always working to ensure Edmontonians have access to the city’s incredible river valley by improving connectivity through staircases and trails, repairing and realigning trails to ensure they are safe and completing stabilization and erosion-control work to manage emergent hazards.
Many users have also noticed a change in the river valley. Katherine Haines uses the trails almost daily in Mill Creek. She worries the continued erosion could ultimately change the face of the river valley.
“It definitely makes me sad,” she said. “That was one of the main factors in our motivation to moving to this area, was to have access to all of those trails.
“You can see how the side of the hill has washed into the water and you can’t really get by.”
The city has an online map to show which trails are closed.
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