Colossal Cave Adventure

[Photo: “Mega Bike” at the Louisville Mega Cavern; photo courtesy Louisville Mega Cavern].

An underground bike park is opening up next month in a former limestone mine 100 feet beneath Louisville, Kentucky.

At 320,000-square feet, the facility is massive. Outside Magazine explains, “the park will have more than five miles of interconnected trails that range from flowing singletrack to dirt jumps to technical lines with three-foot drops. And that’s just the first of three phases to roll out this winter.”

[Photo: “Mega Bike” at the Louisville Mega Cavern; photo courtesy Louisville Mega Cavern].

That’s from an interview that Outside just posted with the park’s designer, Joe Prisel, discussing things like the challenges of the dirt they’ve had to use during the construction process and the machines they used to sculpt it.

[Photo: “Mega Bike” at the Louisville Mega Cavern; photo courtesy Louisville Mega Cavern].

It’s not the most architecturally-relevant interview, if I’m being honest, so there’s not much to quote here from it, but the very idea of a BMX super-track 10 stories underground in a limestone mine sounds like a project straight out of an architecture student’s summer sketchbook, and it’s cool to see something like this become real.