Yeah, we hit the Quebec side for Beer as well.
This weekend myself and 5 other guys did a road trip up to SugarLoaf bike park in NB. If you aren’t familiar, basically its a ski hill with about 9 downhill trails of varrying degress of smoothness/technicality/difficulty built into it. Really any rider at all can have a mess of fun on it.
We had the chance to speak to the bike park manager. I asked him what was the turning point of when they decided they could make it a summer time bike park. The park was known for having one of those concrete sledding rides that went the whole length of the moutain. That meant the lifts ran in the summer anyways. It was open for 25 years, but about 5 years ago they had a massive snow fall. This caused the supports to push thru the concrete. The repair bill would have been $400,000, and there was just not enough demand to support it. So he got permission to build a bike park instead.
I asked “does it make any money” and “does insurance kill you?”, the answers helped shed some light on why perhaps Martock and Wentworth seem to reluctant to turn their hills into Summer Wonderlands.
1: It doesn’t make money. It costs about $30k per KM of trail to build using mini-excavators then you have man-hours + staff + the lift running etc. However its in a Provincial park who’s mandate is to provide recreation for New Brunswickers. So they don’t “have” to make money. Its funded by tax dollars.
2: They don’t have insurance. Its a Provincial park. Intead they have a farm of lawyers sitting in Fredriction that deal with any claims made against the park. You sign a pretty stiff waiver before getting on the hill. Or I assume it was stiff. I didn’t read it, I just signed it. I wasn’t turning down that hill!!
There you have it. We have to either a: trick Martock or Wentworth into becoming provincial parks, or b: sneak into current provincial parks and start building trails and when they get popular, beg them to be turned official 
(this is sort of how SugarLoaf went down)
the bike park is something for the campers to do in sugarloaf. i don’t think it was ever meant to be the main attraction.
you should’ve asked the park manager, how many nova scotians have season passes, even just haligonians, you’d be surprised at the answer…
anyways dh/freeride is not cool in N.S. so why bother bringing up something that we don’t have, or will get in the near future.
Nice! I’d really like to get up there someday. Did you ride any XC trail while you were there? Do you have to use the lift to ride the downhill tracks or is there a trail for riding up as well?
We didn’t ride any XC cause we drove all that way for downhill I think there is a gravel road that goes up the back of the mountain but we didn’t bother. A full day lift ticket is 20 bucks.
there’s a 16 km x/c loop out the back of the mtn. it loops near a lake then climbs the backside of the hill and connects at the big wooden roll in on supersweet. if i remember correctly…
bottom line, if you ride a bike, doesn’t matter x/c or dh, you will enjoy yourself alot. plus you have a campground close, and shopping and what not within a 5 min drive. beer works out to be a $1.10 a can/bottle if you cross the bridge and hit up the redroof in quebec. the only drawback is it’s almost a 6 hour drive…