Featured venture: Navajo Mountain Bike Initiative

Community development, eco-tourism, chemistry, engineering, youth and health. These are just a few of the elements integrated within the Navajo Mountain Bike Initiative, a collaborative effort between the ASU club Engineers Without Borders and the Navajo Nation. Co-lead of the venture, Peter Bugala, loves mountain biking, so when it came to pursuing a project for the club, he envisioned an effort that could help mitigate the major issues facing the Tuba City community, little more than three hours away from Tempe.

The two areas the city self-proclaimed as its most critical crises were economic hardship and health. The Navajo Mountain Bike Initiative hopes to mitigate these struggles by simultaneously providing a source of ecotourism as well as recreational outdoor activities for children to utilize after school. The plans include building two large tracks and additional pump tracks as well as utilizing a hardening agent for durability of the soil which is being developed by Edward Kavazanjian, an ASU Regents Professor and the Ira A. Fulton Chair of geotechnical engineering at the ASU School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment.

The project has received great support from ASU’s Engineering Projects in Community Service program, known as EPICS; Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez; and the Global Sport Institute.

To sustain the trails and their community use, the Navajo Mountain Bike Initiative is also developing an operations and maintenance document for the Tuba City schools to utilize once the track is finished. With their funding from the institute, they hope to allocate funds for the heavy duty equipment needed for building the trails and add a supply of bikes for those who do not have access to one.

With respect to the significant impact that COVID-19 has had on the Navajo Nation, on-location activities came to a halt. “We got, to put a rough estimate, about 60%, 70% done,” Bugala said. To honor the community’s request to remain isolated for safety, the club pivoted into using that time to work internally.

“We absolutely respected that, so we tried to do as much education with our members as we could.” Bugala says that they took small group trips to other closer locations so that, when it came time to resume, the students would have a better understanding of how to best construct the trails and tracks.

With Tuba City positioned geographically between two popular mountain biking haunts in Sedona, Arizona and Moab, Utah, the group envisions trail fanatics adding the new trails as a desired destination to visit.

“Hopefully it will give them national recognition and really give them a boost,” Bugala said. At the same time, they want to inspire the youth not just to get involved but [to be] excited to compete with an organized high school racing team.”

While the project was on pause, Bugala and his club members remained positive and maintained progress. In August 2021, they received approval to return to the site and complete the pump track.