Great Parks of Hamilton County has opened a specially built bike skills course at Mitchell Memorial Forest in Cleves, giving Cincinnati's mountain bikers a safer, more accessible way to train before they ever hit the park's rugged singletrack. The 1,625-acre forest at 5401 Zion Road in Miami Township already drew riders to its existing trail network, but the new course is designed for people who have never thrown a leg over a mountain bike at all.
According to Cincinnati Magazine, the course pairs wide ramps and easy mounds that let beginners practice rolling over obstacles and finding their balance before graduating to the park's actual mountain bike trails. Great Parks CEO Todd Palmeter, a former competitive mountain biker who attended trail-building school and learned how to build sustainable natural-surface trails, said he watched children who had never mountain biked before start riding the course and get comfortable zipping around within an hour. Palmeter and the Cincinnati Off-Road Alliance created the park's biking infrastructure together, a partnership that traces back two decades to when the first phase of Mitchell Memorial Forest's mountain bike trail — four miles of singletrack — was built entirely with volunteer labor.
The skills course itself was constructed in 2025 as part of a $160,000 project first announced in June of that year, according to Movers & Makers. Great Parks and the Cincinnati Off-Road Alliance, known as CORA, officially opened the facility during a public celebration on November 1, complete with food trucks, group rides, and beginner clinics. The installation includes a beginner bike skills course alongside a new quarter-mile skills loop, featuring wide ramps, rises, dips, and banked turns meant to help cyclists build momentum control before tackling the park's 8.2 miles of existing singletrack, per Great Parks.
A Legacy Forest Gets a Modern Upgrade
Mitchell Memorial Forest itself has deep roots in Hamilton County history. The land was gifted to Great Parks in 1974 by William Morris Mitchell, who willed his family's rural country home to the park district to establish a protected public forest, according to Great Parks Forever. Decades later, the district has built on that legacy with a formal enhancement of the site's mountain biking program, guided in part by Great Parks' 2019 master plan, which called for increasing adventure-based recreation across the county.
Beyond the new skills area, Mitchell Memorial Forest offers a full slate of amenities, including the one-mile Wood Duck nature trail, a catch-and-release fishing pond, playgrounds, picnic areas, and reservable camping grounds, the same Movers & Makers report notes. The existing singletrack at the park is split into intermediate and advanced loops, giving riders a clear technical progression once they've mastered the basics on the new practice loop.
Part of a Bigger Regional Push
The Cleves project isn't happening in isolation. Around the same time as the Mitchell Memorial Forest opening, Great Parks also debuted a 1.5-mile mountain bike trail at the Avoca Trailhead in the Little Miami Scenic Corridor in fall 2025, reflecting a broader push for natural-surface cycling options across the county. Great Parks now manages more than 84 miles of trails countywide, spanning mountain bike singletrack, shared-use paved paths, nature trails, and fitness trails.
CORA, which partnered with Great Parks on the Mitchell Memorial Forest build, is aiming much bigger: the group wants to grow Greater Cincinnati's mountain-bike-legal singletrack to 375 miles by 2030, along with 14 neighborhood bike skills courses and four regional bike parks, as reported by Singletracks.com. Founded in 1996, CORA maintains more than 120 miles of multi-use natural surface trails across 15 trail systems in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, serving over 100,000 trail users annually. Those local efforts feed into an even larger vision: the Northern Kentucky Regional Trails Plan calls for a 934-mile interconnected network of off-road trails and paved greenways stretching across the entire Greater Cincinnati metro region by 2030.
Planning a Visit
Riders heading to Mitchell Memorial Forest by car will need a Great Parks Motor Vehicle Permit, which costs $10 annually or $5 daily for Hamilton County residents, and $16 annually or $8 daily for non-residents, under current 2026 pricing. The permits are enforced across every Great Parks location in Hamilton County. For a park district built on a decades-old gift and expanded through years of volunteer trail work, the new skills course marks a shift toward formal, funded investment aimed squarely at getting more beginners on two wheels.
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