This small Utah recreation gem is catching attention. Can it avoid becoming Moab?

Richfield • Call Bill Sikovski the trailblazer. He first drove from his home in Cottonwood Heights to the central Utah town of Richfield three years ago, after seeing a pro mountain biker raving on Instagram about the newly crafted trails here. Last year, his buddy Dave Gilbert joined him. And this year they’re back with a third companion, Ben Ellis.

Over the decades, the friends have sought out little-known towns surrounded by epic mountain biking trails. It was Moab in the 1990s, when the town had just a few food joints to pair with its now world-renown miles of slickrock. Next came the Colorado town of Fruita, which 20 years ago was a whisper of the mountain biking Mecca it has become.

Next up: Richfield.

“These new places that spring up in Utah and Colorado and around the Rockies are awesome,” Ellis said, “if you get there before the crowds—before anybody else finds it.”

Call the trio the canaries in coal mine country, because the crowds are coming, whether Richfield is ready or not.

It’s been five years since Sevier County dubbed itself “Utah’s Trail Country” in an effort to draw more attention to the decades-old off-road and newer mountain biking trails braided through the red rock and mountain landscapes that surround it. And by all measures, the campaign is working. Festival- and race-goers fill up Richfield’s hotels most summer weekends. A new cafe and a bike shop have popped up on Main Street in the past year. And at gas station pumps, side-by-sides line up alongside trucks with mountain bikes peeking over their tailgates.

Residents and visitors say they appreciate the growth that the trail tourism has brought to the area. But they also fret about what the surge in visitation could do to the character of the rural town of 8,000 people. They wonder how they can avoid becoming expensive and overrun, with tensions high among residents, off-roaders, mountain bikers and environmentalists.

They wonder how they can avoid becoming the next Moab.

“Selfishly, I don’t want to happen here what’s been happening in Moab because it’s just become crazy,” said Tyler Jorgensen, a Richfield native and the general manager at Jorgensen’s Power Sports.

“It’s really an amazing territory out here, so the unselfish part [of me] wants to share this with the world,” Jorgensen added. “The selfish part is, ‘Let’s keep it intimate. Keep it small. Let’s not get crazy.’”

Hidden gem is found

Mayor Bryan Burrows acknowledges that trail tourism has become “a big deal” for Richfield. Yet he’s reluctant to have it become the main economic driver.

The town got its name from the fertile soil found there around a large, natural spring. An irrigation ditch still runs the length of the town. Cattle and turkey farms border the south and east sides. Most of the rest is surrounded by public lands, which make up three-quarters of Sevier County.

Over the years, Richfield has evolved into the de facto core of central Utah. Situated along Interstate 70, just a few miles from where it meets I-15, it’s seemingly three hours or less from anywhere in the state and parts of western Colorado. Within a two-hours drive lie three National Parks: Capitol Reef, Zion and Bryce Canyon

One major economic driver is its hospital—the largest between Payson and Beaver. Yet, with farms and ranches consolidating, coal in flux and the recent closure of the area’s gypsum mine, Burrows has begun hyping Richfield’s central location to manufacturers. He hopes to lure them to set up factories in the town.

Many have considered it, Burrows said, but “they just can’t quite turn that corner.”

In the meantime, people have been turning up in record numbers to check out Richfield’s trails.

“I mean, we get nonstop people coming in,” said Burrows, who began his term in 2021, when interest in outdoor activities hit an all-time high nationwide. “When the ATV Jamboree started (in 1993), (Richfield) wasn’t that well known. But since then, there’s people coming here all the time.”

And some are staying more than just a couple days. In the past five years, the median home price has risen 63%, according to Zillow. Statewide, the increase during that same period was 43%. It was 45% in Moab.

The growth is a blessing. But will it be followed by a curse? Burrows witnessed that first-hand, he said, while living in Cedar City in the early 1980s.

“It happened so fast, it’s almost like they couldn’t catch up with it,” he said. “And I don’t want to see that here. I’m OK about growing, but I’d rather it just be a good moderate (growth). I don’t want to see it just blow up.”

Richfield at a crossroads

Tyson Curtis expertly steers a side-by-side over one finger of the Paiute Trail, threading a red rock canyon lined with stubby pinyon and juniper trees. The whine of the machine’s engine fades into white noise while its knobby tires grip onto the sandstone boulders.

The Paiute Trail network is Richfield’s original tourist trail. It touches four counties and connects nearly 3,000 miles of old Forest Service roads and newly created multi-use paths. Some of the more mountainous routes are 50-inch-wide trails, restricted to ATVs and other small vehicles. Most, however, can legally be traversed by anything from a Jeep to a horse to an intrepid hiker.

“I don’t know if I will ever get to all of it,” Curtis said. “But I hope to.”

About 150,000 people run a UTV, ATV or motorcycle on that trail system every year, according to the Paiute Trail Committee. Max Reid, a former Forest Service ranger who has been on the committee since its inception, said by his “conservative” calculations, those visitors spent some $15 million in Sevier County last year.

None of them appear to be out on a sunny Friday morning in early June, or at least they’re not on the Dairy Farm Trail that Curtis is navigating. It feels remote, the kind of place that should take hours to get to. Other than a jackrabbit the size of a beagle and Jorgensen bumping along in another off-road vehicle behind him, not another soul comes into sight. And when the men cut their engines to take in the view near the top—Fishlake National Forest and its 11,000-foot peaks and quaking aspen to the east and the pink-and-gold-striped hills to the west—a tranquil hush settles in.

Curtis, who grew up in Moab but had set down roots in Australia, said this is why he took a pay cut to move his young family to Richfield. He’s now the chief financial officer at Jorgensen’s Powersports. He also heads up its nascent tours operation, JP Sports Adventures. The company started running tours in 2024 in response to a notably higher demand for guided outings in the area. It wanted to be the first on the scene, Curtis said, because “We wanted to be the ones to set the tone.”

If people respect the setting, the access and the others on the trails, he implied, the negative aspects of adventure tourism — the overcrowding and conflicts often noted as the downfall of places like Moab — might not come to roost in Richfield.

“I was in Moab for a long time, and I always thought, ‘Man, when I retire, it’s gonna be Moab,’” Curtis, 37, said. “Now there’s just no way I could ever afford to live there. And it’s not even the same city as it was when I went to school there and graduated and moved back there for a couple years.

“But, when you get out of Moab, out of the town and on the trail, and you come to a spot like this, you’re like, ‘This is Moab again.’ With the Paiute Trail, with 2,000 miles, there will always be a spot that you’ll still have this solitude and this privacy in nature.”

Twenty minutes later, Curtis and Jorgensen are back in Richfield, dusting the grime off their arms in front of the Jorgensen’s Powersports shop. On the gravel road that serves as the return route, they pass a pair of mountain bikers churning up the hill and a shuttle van hauling at least six bikes to the top.

Like them, mountain biking in Richfield is on the rise.

Trails for the locals, and the tourists

If he’s being completely honest, Carson DeMille and his friends didn’t propose the construction of a mountain biking trails network around Richfield to bring more business to the town. That’s the line they told government leaders. Really, they just wanted a place to ride.

“We just built what we liked, what we wanted,” DeMille said. “It was a selfish endeavor. I guess it just worked out.”

County and town leaders initially showed tepid interest in the project, and with good reason. Building mountain biking trails has become a trendy play for western communities of all sizes hoping to attract more visitors. The movement was even dubbed an “arms race” by the online mountain biking magazine Singletracks, which noted the effort has resulted in wildly varied degrees of success.

So DeMille and the upstart Richfield Trails Committee started with a sure thing, or as close as they could find to it.

Utah boasts the fastest-growing youth mountain biking league in the country. To even be considered to host a National Interscholastic Cycling Association race, a site must have miles of moderate trails and be able to accommodate parking for at least a thousand vehicles. But the payoff for a rural town can be just as immense. So DeMille and a group of volunteers united to build a course on a swath of Bureau of Land Management property in Glenwood Hills, 20 miles east of Richfield.

The Glenwood Hills course held its first NICA race in September 2018. More than a thousand school-age racers came, most with parents and siblings in tow. Restaurants were swamped, hotels packed.

DeMille called it a “pretty eye-opening experience for the city and county.”

“We kind of had to start out with volunteer efforts to showcase what the possibilities were,” he said. “And then from there, the city and the county were great partners. We didn’t have to try very hard to convince them to put some investment into it.”

DeMille and a group of about five high school kids broke ground on the first 16 miles of the Pahvant Trail System in early 2019 thanks to a state grant and matching county, city and private funds. By 2021, with more than $800,000 in state and local backing, they’d built a 38-mile network of cross-country and flow trails with options for beginners to experts.

The pièce de résistance is Spinal Tap. Broken into three parts, the trail is 18 miles long with 4,000 vertical feet of elevation loss. Nicknamed “The Full Epidural,” Singletracks recently named it one of the five best mountain biking trails in Utah.

“Those trails are great,” agreed professional mountain biker Jaxon Riddle, a Red Bull Rampage competitor out of St. George who discovered Richfield four years ago, “especially if you’ve got a bunch of friends. … I love e-biking out there, just because you can cover so much ground and ride so much amazing stuff.”

An expansion to the Pahvant Trail System has been proposed, but DeMille said the Forest Service asked the trails committee to first study the impacts of the current network on wildlife and the environment. He said he believes forest managers were caught off guard by the sudden popularity of the trails. When they first opened, DeMille said only about 50 people used the trails, each going about twice a week. Now, he said, it’s closer to 150 riders per day.

“That’s a massive change,” he said.

And it’s not just noticeable on the trails.

Growing pains

For decades, Jorgensen’s Powersports — and later Walmart — served as the area’s main local bike shop. That’s changing quickly, though. The local Ace Hardware began adding full-suspension and e-bikes to its inventory in 2020. And earlier this year Luigi’s, a repair shop that sells mountain bikes and BMX bikes that can be used on the town’s track and its new Red Bull-sanctioned pump track, opened on Main Street.

The growth of biking in Sevier County reflects the sport’s growth throughout the state.

The pandemic-infused influx of interest in most outdoor sports has waned in recent years. Not when it comes to mountain biking in Utah, though. A report released in November found biking added $73 million to Utah’s economy in 2023 — 43% more than in 2022. Per the report, the swell “reflects Utah’s growing reputation as a cycling destination, fueled by expanding trail systems, improved infrastructure and an increasing number of cycling events that attract bikers from across the country.”

Richfield could be the report’s poster child.

Each year, the Glenwood Hills course hosts one or two NICA races, plus other races like the Intermountain Cup cross-country circuit. The ICup races draw 500 to 700 bikers from age 7 to 77, plus their families or friends, according to the circuit’s business developer, Chris Spragg. Meanwhile, NICA races draw closer to 1,200 racers and their supporters, Spragg said. That’s not to mention the enduro races that draw riders to the Pahvant Trails in addition to general trails tourists.

Most need a hotel room and food or at least gas and groceries.

“That is a couple of weekends where a lot of people come to town and ride,” Spragg said. “And it probably feels a little inundating. But for a smaller community, that may be a huge influx in [hotel tax] funds.”

That’s been the case in Richfield. From the time the area began hosting NICA races in 2019 to 2023, when the Spinal Tap trail was completed, tax revenue from hotels and other lodging grew 31.5%. And that doesn’t include the economic influx from the many mountain bikers and OHV drivers who choose to camp at unimproved sites alongside the trails.

As he threw back a cappuccino at a coffee shop that opened earlier this year on Main Street, Dave Gilbert of Millcreek, one of the three biking buddies, said he can see Richfield’s potential. The area and trails are giving off Fruita and Moab vibes. Or rather, those places 15 years ago.

“I do really think that, as they develop this,” he said, “it’s going to drive more of the economy here.”

That’s a good thing, isn’t it?

Depends on the day and who you ask, DeMille said.

“That’s probably one of the most vocal concerns of people’s, is we’re opening Pandora’s box to crazy growth and issues like Moab has,” he said. “I’d be naive to say there probably aren’t going to be some growing pains. There have been some growing pains with more people.”

Balancing act

The changes, so far, have been subtle.

Tyson Curtis, the financial manager at Jorgensen’s Powersports, said he notices mountain bikers giving him disgusted looks more frequently when he drives his side-by-side along the service road that’s a main artery for both the Paiute Trail and the Pahvant Trail System.

“I can see that already, the tension there, where they’re like, ‘Those damn side-by-side off-roaders and four-wheelers ruining the mountain,” he said. “... But the mountain has to be shared, and you have to find a way to get along.”

Noise from the off-road vehicles may become a flash point in town. In an effort to keep disturbances to a minimum, and perhaps also prevent the town’s kids from driving their ATVs down Main Street, Richfield officials have designated preferred routes to the trailheads. But the small, blue signs lead them through neighborhoods, past houses built long before the formalization of the Paiute Trail. Curtis hasn’t heard of any noise complaints from the neighbors. Yet he realizes that people’s tolerance may wear thin as more and more machines pass through.

The same thought can be applied to the mountain bikers who set up camp wherever it’s convenient within the national forest boundary. The three mountain bikers from northern Utah called that one of the best parts of biking in Richfield.

“It’s brilliant,” Park City’s Ellis said, before listing off what he sees as the area’s top attributes. “Proximity, the quality of the trails and the ability to be able to ride out of camp. There’s very few places, even in Colorado, that you can ride out of camp anymore.”

But that, too, doesn’t work for everyone.

Charles Brown has grazed cattle in the Fishlake National Forest for 53 years. The paths his 80 cow-calf pairs take into the grazing grounds is well-worn and well-known to the animals. It is less obvious to some bikers. Brown said he’s woken up more than a few when his herd walks through their campsite. His concern lies less with the disturbance than the safety of the campers, though. The mamas are protective of their calves, and they might see the campers—or more likely, their dogs—as a threat and charge.

He’s advocating for the establishment of a rustic campground, ideally far from the cattle’s path.

“It can be very compatible,” he said, “with a little bit of common sense and respect for each other.”

Common sense, respect, reverence and empathy: For now, that’s what appears to be at the root of Richfield’s crowd management plan. Will it work as word gets out about the Utah town located roughly three hours from everywhere that has some of the best trail systems and vistas in the country?

It might, DeMille said, because Richfield has one key thing going for it: It’s not Moab.

“Moab has two national parks, the Colorado River. They have mountains of slick rock. They have Jeeping. They have thousands of miles of mountain biking trails,” he said. “And maybe, you know, we could try our darndest and never become Moab if we wanted to.”

Correction • July 24, 2025, 11:45 a.m.: This story has been updated to remove a reference to Moab’s Whole Enchilada Trail.

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