Steamboat Springs — Building a downhill mountain bike trail, with its smooth track, wide berms and intricate wooden jumps, is a labor-intensive process.

Preparing a downhill mountain bike trail for the summer season, especially after a strong winter of snow, takes plenty of work, too, and as the aspen leaves popped and the Yampa River roared this spring, trail crews at Steamboat Ski Area found themselves shoulder deep in that task.

As opening day for the 2016 summer Steamboat Bike Park season approached, plenty of snow melted, but not quite enough, at least on Tenderfoot, one of the park’s beginner trails, and thus, for Thursday — the first day of biking — a must-have avenue for riders. So, crews found themselves digging through an eight-foot drift that covered the trail.

“We’re excited for the season,” bike park director Trevyn Newpher said. “Things are drying out, and we’re ready to get rolling.”

The way is clear on Tenderfoot and elsewhere, Newpher said, and the riding is set to start at 3 p.m. Thursday.

The first day won’t actually be available to summer season pass holders; the $15, 3-to-7 p.m. session will instead serve as Routt County Riders Sponsorship Day. All the collected ticket funds and a portion of bike rental income will benefit RCR.

The park will then open for normal operations and for season pass holders Friday, running from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Only a fraction of the park’s completed trails will be available, including, thanks to the shoveling, Tenderfoot, as well as Rustlers, Gunsmoke, Cow Poke and Lickity Split, among several other lower-mountain courses.

“We’re still a bit wet on our north-facing slopes up top, so we won’t have 100-percent open,” Newpher said.

The process of opening those trails will continue, and there’s quite a bit more too it than shoveling snow. Crews resurface jumps and berms, clean up vegetation and debris and rebuild wooden features removed for the winter.

After that, work will continue to progress on several new trails that should open this summer.

The new trails include several highlights. One will wrap around Thunderhead and into the area of winter’s Pony Express chairlift, stretching about 5 miles from the top of the Creekside trail to the Rainbow saddle. It will be a multi-use, multi-directional trail replacing the Zig Zag trail, which formerly offered similar access both up and down the mountain. Sections of that trail were carved up and designed into the downhill bike park trails.

A new beginner trail is set to come online this summer low on the mountain that will separate beginner riders from expert riders in an area in which they previously have been lumped in together. It will be named Lasso.

“We have a lot of traffic feeding into a green trail, and that created some potential user conflicts, so we decided to build Lasso,” Newpher said. “It’s going to give green riders an option, and it has some really cool bridge work and features that could be build on it. It’s not super challenging, but for our green riders, it’ll be pretty exciting.”

That, Newpher said, is a sign of how the park is developing. Steamboat Ski Area is still building out Phase 1 of the park, and more big trails are in the blueprints. At the same time, work is being vectored toward smaller additions and refinements that can make what already exists better for riders of all skill levels.

“There are a lot of projects going on,” he said.

To reach Joel Reichenberger, call 970-871-4253, email jreichenberger@SteamboatToday.com or follow him on Twitter @JReich9