Berm Park
Berm Park — Canton, North Carolina
Berm Park is a free, public mountain bike park — a flow-and-jump playground for every skill level, from first-timers to seasoned shredders. It sits inside Chestnut Mountain Nature Park in Canton, NC, and the whole community helped build it.
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Jump to: Plan your visit · How it rides · The story · Opening day
Plan your visit
- Where: Inside Chestnut Mountain Nature Park, 2153 Asheville Highway, Canton, NC 28716. Search “Chestnut Mountain Nature Park” in your maps app, or tap here for directions — Berm Park is the bike area within it.
- Cost & hours: Free. Open daily, 7:30am to dusk.
- E-bikes: Yes — Class 1 e-bikes are welcome.
- Hiking & spectating: Welcome on the park’s designated hiking and multi-use trails; the Berm Park jump lines are one-way and bike-only, so walkers watch from the trailhead.
- Dogs: Welcome on a leash — just keep them off the bike-only lines.
- Parking: A lot at the base; you climb up from there.
- The full rulebook: Chestnut Mountain’s park rules.
How it rides
There’s no chairlift — this is a pedal-up park, and that’s part of the fun. From the parking lot you climb Papertown Express (about 0.8 miles and ~300 feet of climbing — you can hike it too) to the top. Then you earn it all back: pick your line down and finish on Bear Country, the one-way, bike-only trail that funnels you right to the parking lot.
Bring just about any mountain bike — hardtail or full-suspension. Every trail is flow and jumps (no scary tech), built one-way and directional so you can lap it safely. The lines are stacked side by side, so you can step up one difficulty at a time as you get comfortable.
Five lines, easiest to hardest (full map & conditions on Chestnut Mountain’s site):
- Chain Whip — beginner. Rollers and skinny bridges; great for first-timers.
- High Roller — intermediate. Deep rollers and berms with optional features.
- On the Fly — intermediate/speed. A pump section and three big berms.
- Clickbait — advanced. Wooden features and long tabletops. (Yes, the name’s a wink — more on that below.)
- Roll the Dice — expert. Wall rides, a cannon, and big tabletops.
Want more than jumps? Berm Park is the flow-and-jump zone — but Chestnut Mountain keeps going. There are longer, more challenging backcountry trails further up the mountain from the backcountry trailhead, so you can turn a Berm Park session into a real day out. Grab the whole network on Chestnut Mountain’s trail map.
The story behind it
Berm Park started as a stubborn idea: what if the best trails modern building can produce weren’t hidden on private land or locked behind a lift ticket — what if they were just free, for the whole community, like the tennis courts down the street? I’d spent years building little trails in my own backyard. I wanted to build something bigger, and something that would outlast me.
The land came first. The mountainside Berm Park sits on was once slated to become a motorsports facility. Instead it was bought and permanently protected as conservation land, and — together with the Town of Canton — it became Chestnut Mountain Nature Park: roughly 450 acres of public hiking and biking right next to town. Recreation and conservation, working together. Berm Park is one small, focused corner of it.
Then we had to pay for it. A park like this costs around $200,000 to build, and I didn’t want one big backer calling the shots. So I turned to the people who’d been watching all along. Thousands of you chipped in — anything from twenty bucks to enough to fund an entire trail — mostly through Patreon, alongside a group of supportive companies who believed in it. I signed the construction contract myself, which meant every invoice landed on me whether the money showed up or not. It’s the most nervous a project has ever made me. You came through.
That crowdfunded origin is baked right into the place. The advanced jump line is named Clickbait — a wink from the patrons who funded it. And the climb to the top, Papertown Express, is a nod to Canton itself: a paper-mill town that decided to become a trail town too.
Built by people who actually shred. I’m good at building dumb stuff in my yard, but a public park needs professionals. Every berm, roller, and jump was shaped by a pro trail-building crew and tested on their own bikes before anyone else rode it. (The trails were designed and built by Elevated Trail Design.) The whole park is directional and one-way by design — so a first-timer and an expert can session the same hillside without ever getting in each other’s way.
And then it opened. On a spring day in 2022, hundreds of riders — kids, parents, locals, folks who’d driven hours — showed up to ride a park they’d helped pay for. No waiver, no check-in, no fee. Just show up with a bike and ride.
The best part? I don’t own it. The Town of Canton does. That was always the point — build something that belongs to everybody and outlasts all of us. Thank you, Canton, and thank you to everyone who pitched in.
Opening day
Four years of planning and work, all for one very good day. Here’s the whole thing:
