It's Summer All Winter Long At Ray's Indoor Mountain Bike Park

For as long as man has walked the earth, an avian migration has marked the beginning of the cooler months of fall. Most breeds and species of birds make the yearly journey, sometimes thousands of miles south, where they can avoid the harsh outdoors of winter. The trip can be dangerous, but for most, it’s a matter of survival.

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A train hits the table tops, just a short bit of the 1/4-mile perimeter ride around Ray's.

Welcome to The North Shore of the building, where ladder bridges and a sense of balance rule the roost.

The record setting time around the pump track is ridiculous, like 10 seconds. Practice, young Jedi.

The trials section can only keep those trials guys occupied for so long. Here they are spilling out into the Expert bridges.

Beginning in 2004, another migration began to take place. Mountain bikers of every breed and species, all trying to avoid the same cold climate, have been traveling…

To Ohio.

It is there, in Cleveland to be exact, where a man named Ray is making dreams come true one day at a time. Ray and his small army of volunteers have created a shelter from the elements, and a sanctuary for riders worldwide. Some might call it a skatepark that doesn’t allow skateboarders, but this old building is much more than that. Ray's MTB Indoor Park, a place to hide out during the frigid months of the offseason, to continue riding, to continue progressing. It’s a 66,000 square-foot playground where you can have a blast all winter long.

Ray Petro, a Cleveland-based remodeling contractor, started riding in 96. Not long after, he came to the same realization that most Cleveland-area riders have known for some time: Northern Ohio SUCKS in the winter. Huge storm fronts and lake-effect snow dump an average amount of 40 inches on the Cleveland area every winter. High temps hover around freezing. Why not build an Indoor spot to ride at, to avoid all of the unpleasantries?

Ray undoubtedly wasn’t the first guy to think it, but he was the first guy to do something about it.

“It was a dream, where everything magically fell into place," says Ray. "I’d look every couple of years, and be like ‘y’know, I’m gonna try and do it this year,’ and then last year I decided I was going to try and do it, and I just looked in the newspaper. I called one ad, the first ad I called, the woman that owns the property loved the idea, she said ‘I think you should do it,’ and everything worked out. All these guys came in to help me out, and it was a huge group effort, from the guy that designed the website, to the guys hauling wood in.”

That volunteer group effort wasn’t limited to grunt work either. Although Ray designed the basic layout himself, many of the individual sections were designed by guys like you and me. “I came up with the broad overview of what I thought it should be, and then we’d start putting together little chunks of a line, and then one guy would hook on to this guys skinny, and put a log there, and this guy would do something else. Then they’d come back and be like ‘that’s cool, some guy took what I built and they added on to it.’”

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