PRESQUE ISLE – The Maine Winter Sports Center is strengthening its winter programs by making room for a summer sport – mountain biking.

Officials are investing about $10,000 and hundreds of hours of volunteer work into developing about 10 miles of trails and a terrain park at the Nordic Heritage Center in Presque Isle.

The MWSC is hoping the new mountain bike trails – which also will be used for trail running and walking in the summer, and snowshoeing in the winter – encourage year-round use at the center by the community at large, according to Greg Rawlings, an MWSC adult development coach and trail coordinator.

There is no charge to use any of the facilities at the Nordic Heritage Center.

“Our focus is to make lifelong sports accessible to everybody. If we see it is important, we’ll create the space for it,” Rawlings, who is overseeing the mountain bike project, said recently.

A few years ago, the Presque Isle center’s focus was on biathlon and cross-country skiing activities. The center boasted a few bike trails, which just a handful of people created and were able to ride, and a skate ski loop. But officials wanted more summer offerings at the center to allow athletes to cross-train and to provide local residents with more reasons to visit and options to stay active.

“We had to ask ourselves, ‘What are we doing with the land in the off season?'” Rawlings said.

Their answer was to encourage mountain biking – but not on the center’s ski trails.

“Bikers could ride on the ski trails, but if you have 500 riders out there, it would only work for a few years,” he said.

The center wants to see hundreds of bikers enjoying the center’s trails, Rawlings said, but bikes tend to tear up and wear ruts into groomed trails.

MWSC officials decided to develop new trails on some of the center’s most picturesque property. The idea, Rawlings said, is to give beginning bikers a beautiful riding experience so that they come back for more.

They hired the International Mountain Bicycling Association to design the trails. Trail specialist Rich Edwards visited the center in the fall of 2003 and the spring of 2004 to check out the property and mark trails.

Most of the trails have been cut and about 8.5 miles are rideable right now.

Officials also are building a terrain park, or skills development course, for mountain bikers in the summer and skiers in the winter. The soccer field-sized park, located south of the center’s parking lot, will feature balancing apparatus and skills obstacles. Some of the park equipment will be up by this fall.

With the project in large part complete, Rawlings said he can’t wait to see how the community responds to the new trails.

“The dream is that this place takes on a life of its own,” Rawlings said.