Computer-rendered overview of the various indoor tracks at the Lumberyard. Raw materials stay raw in the Lumberyard. Obstacle buildout underway. Completed course gets a dual test ride. Pre-build rendering of the course. Lumberyard's intermediate section features a dense array of ramps. The beginner section shows more traditional outdoor mountain biking terrain, including the planked walkways that typically stretch between towering, moss-covered trees. Young riders can get their sea legs on the course, too.

Portland, Oregon is most famous for its love of coffee, its fascination with food carts, and its home-grown breweries, and, of course, a TV show that satirizes all three. But it's also know for its awesome mountain biking, if you can stand the rain. A new indoor bike track called the Lumberyard fixes that by bringing out the best obstacles for year-round use, and its design employs software used more often for making video games than for building riding trails.

The project is the brainchild of Will Heiberg, a former artist and a producer for Liquid Development, a consultancy design firm that helps develop props and environments for games like Halo and Mass Effect 2. As a serious mountain biking enthusiast, and former vice-president of the mountain biking nonprofit Northwest Trails Alliance, he determined to put his technology skills to use in building an indoor mountain bike park where everyone could ride anytime they please.

The result is the Lumberyard, a 48,000-square foot facility that features jump lines and technical trail riding obstacles that are scaled for various levels of difficulty, from absolute beginners to X-Games gold medalist Bruce Crisman.

Pulling from his digital design background, Heiberg created his preliminary plan for the project in Autodesk Maya, then dropped it into Unreal Engine, a popular and advanced video game design tool that integrates separate factors like rendering, AI, realistic physics, lighting and animation into one cohesive product. "It will do a real-time pre-visualization so we could walk our investors through the whole facility,” explains Heiberg.

Given enough time, Heiberg could have even coded BMX riders to test the virtual facility for him. Unreal Engine allows developers to drop in stock characters with accessories like rocket launchers to add to the verisimilitude of the game, but “we didn’t really think that would help sell the concept,” he said.

So instead of designing virtual characters, Heiberg recruited real-life expert Joe Prisel, a long-time BMX rider and one of the builders behind pioneering indoor bike park Ray’s MTB, in Cleveland, Ohio. Prisel is one of the top park designers in the world, and for the Lumberyard he partnered with fellow designer Matthew Mangus. Together, Prisel, Mangus and Heiberg worked to construct Heiberg’s vision, but adjusted to take into account real riders’ abilities.

"Joe’s been doing this for over twenty years, so he went in with a really good idea of what was going to work and what wasn’t," Heiberg said. For tabletop jumps, "First, they built the takeoff and the landing, then they’d jump it. As soon as the jump feels right, they built the deck in the middle.”

"I had a lot of interesting ideas that weren’t going to work,” Heiberg admitted. "You’ve ridden one of those box jumps—how cool would it be to have three different options, a little more lip, and depending on how good you are you could hit three different features. Joe convinced me that you need that room on either side to have a big margin. It’s going to be hard to ride the narrower lines, and it’ll increase your exposure and narrow your margin of error.”

Heiberg’s plans will likely be keeping Prisel busy for the time being. The Lumberyard currently has plans for a 20,000-foot expansion, and every few months, Heiberg and his team rotate out park obstacles like the rock gardens and teeter-totter. "That keeps it interesting and fresh,” Heiberg notes, and keeps the Lumberyard a place where local BMX celebrities like Paddy Gross and Brad Tibbet can grab a beer at the bar and trade high-fives with beginners who are just starting their first shaky trip down the pump track.

"Don’t feel intimidated,” Heiberg said. “Just let me know when you’re coming down and I’ll ride with you. I wanted to create a community where everyone could ride together.”

Photos and images: Courtesy Will Heiberg