Milwaukee County Mountain Bike Trails

Milwaukee County will soon approve a trails network plan that could add over 30 miles of mountain bike singletrack over the next five years. That would triple the county’s current level.

From the outside, this is going to look like a community that finally got its act together and built more trails. From the inside, it looks like the end of a very long setup.

Here’s the number that explains everything: 14 miles. That’s how many miles of mountain bike trail Milwaukee County has today, after 31 years of organized advocacy. The people who built those 14 miles aren’t sheepish about the math. They’re matter of fact about it. They understood early that the trail itself was never really the point. The foundation was.

In the late 1980s, a group of Milwaukee riders did what mountain bikers did when there was nowhere legal to ride: they went out anyway. Full-moon Wednesday nights, lights duct-taped to helmets, looping through Wauwatosa village trails, State Fair Park, and the Milwaukee River corridor.

Marty Weigel, one of the regulars, has a specific word for what they were doing. He doesn’t call it rogue. He calls it bootleg. “Bootleg is mostly harmless and enjoyable,” he says. “It’s just not legal.”

One night, Weigel looked behind him and counted 15 headlights.

“I said, hey, we can do something legit with this. We don’t have to stay in the shadows.” Not long after, a classified ad appeared in the back of Silent Sports magazine. The Wisconsin Off-Road Bike Association was holding a board meeting at a Wheel & Sprocket store in Delafield, Wisconsin. Weigel and a friend drove out. There were four people in the room.

One of them was Chris Kegel. Kegel, co-owner of Wheel & Sprocket, was already thinking on a timescale most people in that room weren’t. His daughter Amelia Kegel, who now co-runs the company, describes how her father approached advocacy: “He would always think bigger than smaller. We have to plan for 70 years from now, 100 years from now, if we want to have a true vision.” He had learned, through the DNR’s early 1990s push to eliminate mountain bike access on state land, that this work moved slowly by nature. “You plant a seed,” Amelia Kegel says, “and 20 years later you have a bike trail.”

Out of that period came Metro Mountain Bikers, the Milwaukee-area club Weigel helped found. Their early trail days weren’t even in Milwaukee County. They worked at John Muir Trails near Whitewater, Wisconsin, the nearest legitimate singletrack in the region. They raised money for John Muir, organized volunteer crews, attended planning meetings, and made themselves known as a group that could be trusted to do the work and stay within the rules. They showed up whether anything visible was happening. And for a long time, nothing visible was happening.

Metro had an organization. They had a mission. What they didn’t have was a local trail.

The middle of this story is hard to tell because, for long stretches, not much drama was happening, but that’s the whole point.

The first real crack came with a change in Parks’ leadership. Weigel describes his first meeting with Sue Baldwin, Milwaukee County’s parks director in the early 1990s, as a lesson in institutional caution. The message he got: identify where you want trails, raise all the money yourself, and Parks will send staff to build them.

Given that there were no professional trail-building contractors at the time and no established design standards for what a mountain bike trail should even look like, that arrangement wasn’t going to produce anything.

Then Baldwin’s successor arrived. Sue Black took one look at the situation and said, according to Weigel, “Wait a minute. You’re telling me Milwaukee County doesn’t have any mountain bike trails?” He confirmed that it was correct. Her response: “We’re gonna do something about that.”

The Kegel Alpha trail system in Franklin came out of that opening. It was the first.

From there, Metro earned an MOU with Milwaukee County Parks. An MOU, or Memorandum of Understanding, is the formal agreement that allows a volunteer organization to do maintenance and trail work on public land. It sounds administrative because it is. It’s also the document that made everything else possible.

It took years to negotiate and get in place. Kegel notes that Metro’s MOU is now one of the oldest standing in the parks system and one of its most effective partnerships.

Metro built credibility in other ways. A WORS (Wisconsin Off-Road Series) race at the Crystal Ridge ski hill in Franklin, Wisconsin, drew 1,200 riders and sold out. Weigel faxed race results to the Milwaukee Journal sports desk to get them into the newspaper box scores, a small move with a clear intention: make the sport visible to people who needed to see it. “We’ve never been the hornblowers,” he says. “I always thought that if the people who need to make the decisions are on board that would be okay.”

That approach had its costs. A neighbor complaint could reset a project. A county supervisor could raise questions about a process that had already been followed correctly. Weigel is plainspoken about what staying in it actually felt like: “My wife will tell you I’ve been so pissed off about stuff so many times.” But he kept coming back.

Chris Kegel was making the same choice from a different vantage point. Wheel & Sprocket rarely had the funds to support these projects. What they had was time, expertise, and a network.

In every advocacy fight, in every national organization (IMBA, Bikes Belong, the National Bicycle Dealers Association), Wheel & Sprocket showed up. Kegel carries that forward now. “Where we are today only happens because of all the hard work that came before us,” she says. “A lot of this work is unpaid. It comes out of passion.”

In 2004, Milwaukee County created a new staff position: trails coordinator. The position itself was a product of what Metro had built. They had earned enough institutional trust that the county decided the relationship warranted dedicated oversight.

Guy Smith got the job. Two of the first people he met were Marty Weigel and a fellow longtime advocate named Harold Schmidt. They took him mountain biking. That’s how Metro always operated: get people on bikes and let the experience make the argument.

Smith also watched Metro demonstrate, year after year, that volunteer labor could be a structural part of how a parks department operates, not just an occasional supplement. “It went from, oh, this is something new,” Smith says, “to that’s just how we do business now.”

Today, Milwaukee County Parks coordinates over 66 volunteer friend groups across the system. Invasive plant removal, litter cleanups, trail maintenance, and tree planting all of it grew from the model Metro helped establish. What started as a mountain biking agreement became the template for how the department engages the public.

Smith rose through the department over two decades, eventually becoming Executive Director of Milwaukee County Parks. The person overseeing the trails network plan approval is someone who learned the sport from the same community that spent 31 years asking for more of it.

Kegel doesn’t think that’s a coincidence. “We have a director who gets it,” she says. “I think that is one of the most important, foundational reasons why all this is getting approved. We can’t underestimate that.”

The trails network plan covers more than mountain biking. It includes paved paths, hiking trails, and an urban water trail for paddlers. But for the mountain bike community, the numbers are significant: the plan enables Metro to reach its goal of 30 miles of new singletrack over five years, in locations distributed across the county, closer to the neighborhoods and schools where riders live.

That last part matters more than it might seem. Wisconsin NICA, the state’s youth mountain bike league, has over 100 kids competing from Milwaukee County right now. Most of them share 14 miles of trail concentrated at the county’s edges, which is inconvenient for families and discouraging for younger riders still finding their footing in the sport. The expansion doesn’t just add mileage. It puts trails where the kids are.

The sport itself has changed in ways the founding generation didn’t fully anticipate. The Mountain Dew renegade rider image Weigel describes from the early years, the one they spent a long time trying to outlast, is mostly gone. In its place is a changing demographic.

Kegel puts it simply: “It turns out many people enjoy riding through the woods on their bikes.”

Getting trails to where those people live is a different problem than simply building more trails. The plan takes that seriously, guided by an equity index Milwaukee County Parks developed to direct resources toward historically underserved areas.

Recent approvals signal the momentum is real. In December 2025, Parks lent their support to the reopening of a mile of trail at Kegel Alpha that had been closed for a decade, as well as to planning for up to 2.5 miles of new trail at Doyne Park.

Both moved faster than most county projects do. Both moved fast because the slow work was already done. The relationships, the trust, the formal agreements, the institutional memory, all of it was in place when the opportunities arrived.

The vote coming soon will get some coverage. The mountain bike community will talk about Milwaukee finally catching up on mountain bike infrastructure. Some will be surprised it happened so quickly. The people who built it will just nod.

But somewhere there’s a kid who is going to ride a trail in Milwaukee County that didn’t exist before, on land that’s been public for decades, built through a process that started with four people in a bike shop in Delafield on a Tuesday night in the early 1990s. That kid won’t know any of those names. They’ll just ride.

That’s what 31 years of groundwork produces. Not a trail. A future that works without you in it.