Non-native species, such as Sitka spruce and lodgepole pine, were often favored for their timber properties. The trees were planted in “coupes”—areas of several acres—at the same time, “and they were planted in straight lines so they were easier to harvest.” All of this led to a forest that was “genetically very low in diversity and really bad habitat for wildlife,” Astley explains, with uniformly high trees blocking out delicate from the forest floor, preventing other species from growing.
If this plantation-style forest was bad for biodiversity, Astley and his co-founders quickly realized it was also bad for their business. “The two things just don’t go together, commercial forestry and a mountain bike park,” he says. Mountain bike trails—narrow strips of land rarely more than a metre wide—don’t cover much ground. “In terms of percentage, we’re probably using 1.5 per cent of the land,” Astley explains. But the longest trails wind for 5 kilometres back and forth through the forest, so they require a lot of space.
“If you cut down one hump of trees, you’d have to close 10 trails for six months and the impact on our business would be huge,” says Astley. He says that in the 11 years the NRW bike park has been operating, it has managed to avoid cutting down any humps in the “core area” of Gethin Woodland – the 120-hectare zone where its current trails are located. “But we got to the point where NRW said, ‘We can’t allow you to develop any more trails on the hill because it’s just going to make it harder for us to get timber.’” It was clear that something had to change. And rewilding – actively helping the woodland around the trails to return to the state they were in before they were planted – seemed like the perfect solution.
Astley, a zoology graduate, has always been “green-minded,” he says. “I think morally that companies have a role to play in the fight we’re fighting, with climate change and biodiversity loss and so on.” At the same time, he and his partners realized that a mixed forest of native species would be more resilient to a range of threats that could threaten the park’s future.
“Before we started work on building the trails in 2013, a large epidemic of a disease called Phytophthora ramorumwhich infected larches all over the UK,” he explains. “There was a lot of larch here, maybe 30 per cent, and fortunately NRW’s predecessor removed all of it just before we opened because they knew we couldn’t manage an area with all those dangerous dead trees,” he says. However, similar businesses haven’t always been so lucky. “Revolution Bike Park in mid-Wales has been closed for over a year because their hill was Phytophthora ramorum“- says Astley. “They had to clear the whole hill.”
As Astley explains, in addition to being more susceptible to disease outbreaks, single-species forests, with trees in straight lines, are also less resilient to wildfires. “Last July, there was a huge fire at the back of our hillside, and the wind blew it towards us,” he says. “For about a week, our elevated road was covered in smoke, and the fire department was dropping water from helicopters to try to put it out. It was really scary.” The more they thought about it, Astley says, the more he and his partners realized that rewilding made sense—both from a business and an environmental perspective. Compared with the current monoculture, a natural forest would be “just much more resilient on all counts,” he says. “We realized there was an opportunity to try to win on both fronts.”