Photos: Palmer Bike Park

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Nolan Reid, 10, launches off a ramp at the Palmer Bike Park. The Palmer Bike Park, located in Matanuska River Park, features dirt jumps, wooden ramps, a pump track and singletrack trails. Photographed on Saturday, May 9, 2015.

PALMER -- The first full-fledged free bike park in Southcentral Alaska isn't in Anchorage.

It's in sleepy little Palmer, the city founded as a New Deal farm colony and now trying to leverage its increasingly popular mountain biking trails into a recreation destination.

The Palmer Bike Park is tucked off the Old Glenn Highway at Matanuska River Park, located on a former overflow parking lot just north of a playground and broad grassy picnic area.

Built last fall, the bike park is actually three in one, according to Nate Nicholls, executive director of the 150-member Valley Mountain Bikers and Hikers, the group that's behind the park.

The star feature is an almost 2-acre "pump track" with a jump line to get some air but also packed dirt mounds and undulating short wooden boardwalks -- "Nessie humps" -- that riders are supposed to travel by pumping and gliding instead of pedaling. Beyond are two different quarter-mile tracks that connect to an existing network of mountain bike trails -- a "flow trail" designed to give riders a feel for their bikes on a trail and a technical track to hone technical bike handling skills with a low log ride, rocky sections and tight turns.

READ MORE: Palmer Bike Park opens to the public