How Charlie Sturgis, and mountain bikes, built the country’s best trail system

At various times, in various publications, Charlie Sturgis has been called “The godfather of Park City singletrack,” “The minister of outdoor satisfaction,” “The cool uncle of Park City’s outdoor lifestyle,” “The Trailblazer-in-chief.” In 2021, the Park City Chamber of Commerce created a new award, the Community Impact Award, just so they could make him its inaugural recipient.
So how does Charlie react to all this fuss and praise?
“Well,” he says, “A big reason I did it was for me.”
What Charlie “did” was play a significant role in creating what is arguably the best trail system in the country, maybe the world.
Everywhere you look: trails. Some are cut through mountainsides thick with firs and spruces, others through foothills laden with sagebrush, some skirt the edges of neighborhoods, some the edges of cliffs. A few are paved, the vast majority are dirt. They’ll take you to Jupiter Peak or the front door of Smith’s Food & Drug. Hikers, bikers, skiers, runners, walkers, bird watchers, strollers, horse lovers, dog walkers, they all use them, along with moose, deer, elk and the occasional bobcat.
There are some 400 miles of trails in the Park City area alone, in addition to the hundreds more in neighboring Wasatch County and the east part of Summit County. In 2012, Park City was the first place on earth to be given Gold-level Ride Center status by the International Mountain Bicycling Association.
All this in sharp contrast to 1985, when Charlie arrived on the scene and there were practically no trails. And almost all of the existing ones weren’t legal.
A Chicago native, Charlie moved to Utah because, like so many before and since, he came here to ski — in his case, a vacation to Snowbird in 1973 — and the mountains seduced him. The next thing he knew, he was back on an airplane to the promised land. He was 24 years old. Knew almost no one. Didn’t have a car. But unlike a lot of ski bums who shake off their early life crisis and soon return to wherever they came from, Charlie turned into a lifer. While getting a business degree from the University of Utah, and marrying his wife, Kathy, he settled down and embraced everything you could do in the mountains: lift skiing, backcountry skiing, cross-country skiing, running, hiking, climbing. And when mountain bikes came along, mountain biking.
He moved to Park City in 1985 to take over management of White Pine Touring, a small cross-country skiing outfit run by two guys living in teepees in White Pine Canyon. Charlie expanded the business, moved it closer to town and, in addition to nordic gear, started selling these new inventions called mountain bikes.
One problem quickly emerged: it’s difficult to sell mountain bikes when the mountains have virtually no trails.
That’s when Charlie and White Pine began making some. They’d follow existing game trails or old worn miners’ paths and start cutting away roots and stumps. Like Tom Sawyer, Charlie got his customers to do a lot of the work. He organized Thursday night and Sunday group rides, part of which were devoted to trail building.
“Nothing was legit; it was all trespassing, essentially,” remembers Charlie. “You could never get these mining companies to open trails, but there was nobody out there telling you you couldn’t …”
In bits and starts, a trail system of sorts began to emerge. Then, in 1992, the Utah Legislature passed the Utah Landowners Liability Act, a bill that protected landowners when opening their land to public use.
That’s when Jan Wilking, another Park City visionary with his own vested interest (he published two bicycling magazines), contacted Charlie and suggested they start Mountain Trails Foundation, a nonprofit devoted solely to expanding the trail system.
The two incorporated the foundation, drummed up donations, bought some shovels, hired an attorney, Troy Duffin, to head the effort, and just like that trail-building turned into a legit business. A few years later, Basin Recreation, the entity overseeing all things recreational in the Snyderville Basin, followed suit by starting its own trail-building program, as did two more newly minted nonprofits, Summit Trails and Wasatch Trails.
At that point, with Mountain Trails up and running and in good hands, Charlie focused on running his own business. But in 2010, he returned as CEO of Mountain Trails, ushering in an era of exponential growth until his retirement in 2021. (To see how extensive the trail system is, click on this interactive map: Summer Interactive Map — Park City Trail System).
Charlie looks with pride, and not a little astonishment, at all the trails that have been built on his watch. “It’s a pretty cool legacy to leave behind,” he allows, “But the biggest thing for me, over my entire career I got to make sure people were having fun. Basically I got away with 40 years of selling fun and watching people make these great lifestyle choices, which are conducive to healthy living.”
Charlie found that out personally in the summer of 2023 when doctors discovered cancer in his tonsils.
Seven weeks of intensive chemotherapy, radiation and eating out of a feeding tube ensued. Charlie’s fitness, the doctors told him, played a “big time” role in his recovery.
He says he got through the ordeal, particularly the 35 sessions in the radiation tunnel, “by thinking about all the good times and vibes I’ve had in my life.”
“It was kind of a rough summer,” Charlie understates, “the good part was it was just seven weeks. After seeing what people have to go through in and out of Huntsman (Cancer Institute), you get an appreciation for how lucky you really are.”
That leaves Charlie today, at 72, to 1) work at regaining the 15 pounds he lost, and 2) continue to wear out Park City’s trails — including the one named after him, called Charlie’s 9K, in the newly opened Bonanza Flats section near Guardsman Pass.
And why not? “It’s all free, it’s totally inclusive, there are no fees,” he says.
Anybody can use them. You don’t even have to know the guy who built them.