Last night at Obsolote Brewing, Northgate's board showed off their planned expansion of the trail network into Riding Mountain National Park, and some updates to their existing network.
Clayton Swanton, President of Northgate Trails, said the proposed changes to the existing network will mostly be light work, and the bulk of their plans focus on the new network.
"I think the stuff on our current Northgate network is more of improvements, kind of some alterations rather than expansion there, but most of the primary expansion point will be off of the Crawford trail head," said Swanton.
As they've always been, Swanton said Northgate still remains committed to the multi-use factor of their trail system, and will ensure that the new trails within Riding Mountain National Park stay multi-use. Their proposed system highlights that. They plan on using the existing Crawford Trail as a backbone to climb, and building new trails that bikers, hikers, horseback riders and the like can sort of "peel off" from the existing trail.
"We found that when we created new and called it multi-use from the start, we really got a lot of buy-in there, we haven't had a lot of user conflict, if any. Crawford's a little bit different because there is a main trail that different groups are used to using, but because we're building new trail again off of Crawford, and we have been consistent about it being multi-use, we know the user groups out here can co-exist...in the summer we can have hikers, runners, bikers, and horseback on the current one that they are used to using now all co-exist, so we think we can pull that off," said Swanton.
The expansion into Riding Mountain National Park has a big unique challenge: birds. The park is home to the Golden-winged Warbler, a Near Threatened species of bird. Their nesting season over the summer is a time where Northgate can't develop in the park whatsoever. Swanton said that doesn't cause any issue other than delay because of how they will be building the trails. Once nesting season is over, he hopes to hit the ground running. Or in this case, biking.
"We don't want to disturb that, we want to make sure that they're protected. August 15th is the date where we know that nesting season is done, and the environmental impact is subsided, so we hope to hit the ground running then," said Swanton.
With unique challenges like the Golden-winged Warbler, the level of constant communication between Parks Canada, the Manitoba government, the RM of Dauphin and the City of Dauphin, as well as Northgate, has been unlike any project ever seen before in Canada. Swanton said he's very happy with how the inter-department communication has been going, and it's working very well.
"We've been very fortunate with all the players that are involved with this project, we're on bi-weekly Teams meetings with the Park, with the City, with Northgate and with Alex [Man] to make sure that everybody is apprised of what's going on to make sure that we hit these super tight timelines...we couldn't be more impressed with the leve of professionalism, still following all the guidelines and rules, but making sure that there's no excuses and we're moving forward," said Swanton.
In the province's recently announced 2026 Budget, Northgate was given a $1.5M grant for the expansion into Riding Mountain National Park. The project is a first-of-its-kind in Canada, involving provincial funding in collaboration with all levels of government in a National Park.
