Spark · Issue 11
The Cuyuna Paradigm, Part 2: Building the Model to Support the Trails
In Part 1, I wrote that demand outgrew the model. The trails were built deliberately. Everything that followed was organic. That worked well enough during the growth phase. It leaves a question open that the region is now living with in real time.
What does the next layer look like, and who designs it?
I drove up to Crosby last fall on a Tuesday afternoon. Part of the reason was a meeting. Part of the reason was just to walk the streets and look. What I noticed was simple. The trail parking was modest but real. The downtown had charm. And several of the places I would have stopped were closed. Not closed forever. Closed on a Tuesday in October, because the demand engine is not consistent enough yet to keep the doors open every day of the week.
That observation sits at the heart of what this piece is about.
The original trail was a civic act. John Schaubach and the founders did not set out to build a tourism economy. They set out to give their community a reason to believe in itself again. The paved trail was a workforce recruitment tool. Turning contaminated mine land into a place worth visiting was an act of reinterpretation before any of us had the vocabulary for it.
The next chapter is also a civic act. It is just bigger.
What’s been built, what’s still being built
Drive into Crosby on a Saturday in July. The trailhead is full. Riders are unloading bikes, checking tire pressure, pulling on gloves. The energy is real.
Now drive down Main Street.
There is more here than there used to be. The Cuyuna Lakes region has organized itself. The chamber, local operators, the trail crew, and county leaders have built real infrastructure and real momentum. Spend a few minutes on cuyunalakes.com and you can see a region that is taking itself seriously.
The question is not whether momentum exists. It does. The question is whether the region is ready to take the next step. From a collection of weekend stopovers to a destination that holds people. From a trail economy to a connection economy. From a great ride to a place worth coming back to for reasons that have nothing to do with the bike.
That step does not happen by accident. It happens by intentionality. By leaders, business owners, and community members coming together to decide, with clear eyes and a long horizon, what they want this place to become in ten and twenty years. And then aligning around it.
That is the gap. Not a gap of effort. A gap of orchestration.
The third place question
Before we get to any data, hold a question in your head.
What is it that makes a place feel like a place?
Part 1 borrowed Bergstrom’s framing that Cuyuna’s first transformation was an act of reinterpretation. The mine pits became swimming lakes. The red dirt became the riding surface. The industrial past was not erased. It was layered with new meaning. That reinterpretation built the first set of associations the region carries today.
The next reinterpretation is harder, because it is not about land. It is about social infrastructure.
Urban sociology gives us a useful frame. The home is the first place. Work is the second. The third place is everywhere else. The coffee shop where the regulars know each other. The brewery where strangers strike up conversations. The park where the same dogs meet on the same mornings. The diner where the waitress remembers your order.
Third places are not amenities. They are the social infrastructure of belonging. They are what make a town feel like a town and a destination feel like a destination. They are the places where memories get made, and they are the reason people stay an extra hour, and an extra night.
A region’s destination economy is built on third places, even if no one calls them that.
The trail at Cuyuna is a peak moment. The descent that gets your heart up. The view at the lookout. The sweep of pine and water that you carry home with you. Peak moments are real and they matter. But research on memory tells us that peak moments alone are not what people remember most. What sticks is the peak and the end. How a place sends you off shapes whether you come back.
Right now, Cuyuna’s peak is the trail. The end, for too many visitors, is a gas station and a drive home.
The question for the region is not how to build more trails. The trails are extraordinary. The question is what happens between the peak and the end. What is the third place that holds people for an hour after the ride? What is the dinner that turns a day trip into an overnight? What is the moment that interrupts the routine of leaving?
That is the work that still remains.
(Image Credit: @AaronWHautala and cityofcrosby.com)
What the behavioral data is whispering
The Placer.ai data is one signal. Imperfect, like all data, but useful when read with care.
The trailing twelve months ending March 2026 show 365,500 out-of-market visitors to Crosby, down about 1.9% from the prior year. The hourly pattern is relatively flat from late morning to early evening. Visitors are present during the day. They are not, by and large, staying into the night.
Where they go when they are not on the trail tells the rest of the story.
The most-visited destinations in Crosby are gas stations and a hospital. The first trail-adjacent hospitality venue captures roughly 18% of the traffic the convenience stores see. Liquor stores are indexing high enough to suggest visitors are buying alcohol to take with them rather than consuming it in a place that serves food. Full-service dining and drinking establishments come in well below what the visitor base would suggest is possible.
That pattern is not a verdict on the businesses that exist. There are places to eat. There is a brewery. There is a Main Street that anyone who has visited will tell you has charm. The pattern is a question. Why is more of this demand not being captured?
Some of it is structural. When I visited on a Tuesday last fall, a number of places were closed. The demand engine is not consistent enough to justify staying open all the time. That creates a feedback loop. Inconsistent hours discourage visitors from planning around dining. Limited dining keeps stays short. Short stays keep demand inconsistent.
Breaking that loop is not a marketing problem. It is an orchestration problem. It requires a coordinated decision among operators, the region, and capital partners to underwrite the next layer of the visitor experience together. No single business can carry that on its own.
(Image Credit: cityofcrosby.com)
The overnight question
How do you turn a day visitor into an overnight one?
This is one of the hardest questions in destination development, and it is the one Cuyuna will have to answer in some form if the trajectory is going to bend.
The accommodation supply tells us where things stand. Roughly 106 active short-term rentals are generating an average of about $21,800 per listing per year, at occupancy near 36%. Supply grew about 31% year over year, which means residents and investors are adding inventory faster than demand is filling it. There is no hotel of meaningful scale in the immediate trail area.
Research published in Scientific Reports in 2024 found that accommodation supply is the primary lever for overnight conversion. Each additional bed contributes a small but compounding lift. Cultural and natural amenities add another layer on top. The same research surfaced something harder to hear. Communities that are heavily oriented around day trips, with abundant parking and convenience infrastructure, can actually suppress overnight conversion. The signals tell visitors this is a place you pass through.
That is not a criticism of Cuyuna. It is an observation about how places get optimized over time. The first wave of investment built what was needed for the day trip. The next wave is a different kind of investment. It is about the room someone wants to come back to, the breakfast that makes Sunday worth staying for, the third place that gives an evening a reason.
The Minnesota Design Team’s 2024 visit through CREDI surfaced this as a regional priority. The next move depends on the community taskforces that are forming to advance the work. That is exactly right. Data points the direction. Vision and capital have to come from the people who live there.
The destination is between acts.
The tension nobody wants to talk about
Part 1 surfaced the income canyon as the central tension of Cuyuna’s next chapter. Here is how that tension actually shows up.
Average household income for a Cuyuna trail visitor sits around $103,000. The largest single visitor segment earns between $100,000 and $125,000. Crosby’s median household income is just over $51,000. Minnesota’s statewide median is closer to $96,000.
These numbers do not tell us that visitors are good and residents are bad, or that one matters more than the other. They tell us that a region is being repriced by its own success. Visitors come. They fall in love with the place. And many of them ask the natural next question. Could I have a piece of this? A vacation home. A cabin to rent out. An investment in the community we just discovered.
That is not a villain story. That is a free market responding to demand. It is what makes this country work. But it creates a tension that every successful recreation community in America is now trying to navigate.
The All-Transactions House Price Index for Crow Wing County is up roughly 73% from 2019 to 2025. Some of that is a COVID effect still working through the system. Some is structural. The Crow Wing County Workforce Housing Study found about half of renter households were cost-burdened. Headwaters Economics has documented that renters in recreation-dependent counties spend about 23% of their wages on housing, compared to 19% elsewhere.
The housing market is the outcome, not the problem.
The deeper question is one every region will have to answer for itself. How do we balance attainable housing for the workforce that delivers the guest experience with the visitor revenue that funds the local economy? What do we regulate? What do we leave alone? How do we welcome investment without pricing out the people who make the destination work?
This article is not going to pretend to have those answers. The honest position is that they have to be worked out, locally, by the people who live with the consequences. Zoning, land use, regulation, incentive, taxation, partnership. None of these tools is a silver bullet. All of them belong on the table.
What this article is saying is that this conversation has to be elevated. It belongs inside the regional vision, not in a footnote to it. Because the visitor economy is moving faster than the planning system, and the gap is widening.
A product, or a place?
Here is a hypothesis worth testing.
Read through enough TripAdvisor reviews of the Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area and a pattern emerges. The language is overwhelmingly functional. Trail quality. Flow. Difficulty. Riding conditions. Words like community, belong, home, culture, and people show up rarely if at all.
Visitors are experiencing the product. They may not yet feel connected to the place.
This is consistent with the broader behavioral pattern. A concentrated visitor base from a single metro area. A ride-and-leave spending rhythm. Minimal engagement beyond the trail, the bike shop, and the gas station.
What does this suggest?
It suggests that Cuyuna’s associations are still mostly functional. Great trails. Good flow. Worth the drive. Those associations are real, and they are earned. But functional associations are also fragile. They are easily substituted. If a closer trail system opens, or a newer one, the functional need gets met somewhere else.
What holds people across years and seasons is identity-level association. The feeling that a place reflects who they are, not just what they do there. That kind of association is not built by accident. It is built by orchestration. The peak moment, the third place, the small kindness from a local, the meal that became the story they told their kids on the drive home. Memories are sequenced. They are not random.
The work is to design that sequence.
This is where the conversation about social infrastructure, dining culture, gathering spaces, and authentic local programming stops being about amenities and starts being about economic strategy. The two are not separate. The third place is the engine.
What we can learn from places that have walked this road
Bentonville comes up in every trail-town conversation. The Walton Family Foundation’s investment, hundreds of millions across trails, museums, and hospitality, makes the comparison imperfect for any region without that capital base. That asymmetry is real. It deserves to be named.
But the structural lesson is replicable.
Bentonville did not just add trails. It built identity-level reasons to stay. Crystal Bridges Museum created a category of association, art and culture and sophistication, that complemented the riding and made the place feel like more than a destination for one demographic doing one thing. The cycling industry generates an estimated $411 million in annual economic impact across Northwest Arkansas. Event impact roughly doubled between 2023 and 2024.
Oakridge, Oregon offers a closer analog. A timber town that pivoted to mountain biking. Mountain bikers spend $2.5 to $5 million annually. Overnight visitors spend roughly $124 per day. The Mountain Bike Oregon festival became the engine because it required overnight stays and gave people reasons to be there beyond a single ride. Oakridge has not reached Bentonville’s scale, and the limit appears to be accommodation supply and the absence of identity-level amenities.
The pattern beneath both stories is the same. Places get economically stronger when they build multiple, mutually reinforcing reasons for people to stay, spend, and identify. The reasons compound. They do not have to be world-class museums. They can be a food culture. A festival. A gathering space. A character that the place wears comfortably.
Cuyuna already has the foundation. The Mountain Bike Festival is a starting point. The natural endowments are extraordinary. The region’s character, the lakes, the towns, the heritage of what was reclaimed from mine pits, is the kind of authentic story most destinations would invent if they could.
The question is what comes next, and who gets to decide.
The questions worth elevating
This is not a prescription. It is a list of the questions a regional vision conversation will probably need to wrestle with.
The first is about overnight capacity, and what kind. The 106 short-term rentals at 36% occupancy are a floor, not a ceiling. The question is whether the next increment of accommodation will be more of the same, or whether it will be a purpose-built layer of hospitality that signals to visitors that this is a place to stay, not just pass through. Boutique hotel. Outdoor hospitality property. Well-designed basecamp concept. The form matters less than the signal.
The second is about the visitor experience between the trail and the drive home. The dining and gathering infrastructure that exists is real but inconsistent. What would it take to support the operators who are here, fill the gaps, and make the evening worth staying for? This is partly capital and partly coordination. It is not solved by one new restaurant. It is solved by a region deciding it is going to invest in the third place together.
The third is about governance. A volunteer trail association, a small bike crew, and a couple of DNR staff have built something remarkable. Whether the institutional framework can carry the next stage at the current scale is a worthwhile question for the region to examine. A named regional leader, a clear timeline, and committed funding for the next phase would change the conversation with capital partners almost immediately.
The fourth is about housing and balance. Not how to stop the recreation premium, which is not really stoppable, but how to plan for it. How to keep workforce housing in the equation. How to use the tools that local government actually has, zoning, incentives, public-private partnership, in ways that match the scale of what is happening. And how to acknowledge, honestly, that this is a national challenge being lived out locally.
The fifth is about feeder market diversity. More than 60% of out-of-market visitors come from the Twin Cities. That concentration is a strength today and a risk tomorrow. Duluth, Fargo, Rochester, and the Iowa and Wisconsin corridors all represent expansion potential. Each requires its own understanding, not an assumption that what works for Twin Cities riders will translate.
None of these questions has a single right answer. All of them deserve to be on the table at the same time.
The work that remains
The people who built Cuyuna did something remarkable. They took land that had been abandoned, contaminated, and written off and turned it into something hundreds of thousands of people now choose to visit each year. They did it through grassroots effort, volunteer labor, and belief in a place that most of the state had forgotten.
That work is not diminished by what this analysis raises. It is honored by taking it seriously enough to ask the harder questions.
The trails were the foundation. They proved the demand. They put the Cuyuna Range on the map.
Trails alone do not build a destination economy. They build a day-trip economy. And a day-trip economy, left unaddressed, will eventually reprice the community, thin out the workforce, and concentrate the returns among fewer operators while the place that made it all possible holds the infrastructure costs.
The first chapter of the Cuyuna story was a civic act. A small group of people decided their community deserved a future and built the infrastructure to make that future possible. The next chapter has to be a civic act too. The forces that success set in motion are already reshaping this place. The only real question is whether the community designs the next layer of infrastructure with the same intentionality the first one was built with.
Part 3 will look at what that design process could actually look like. The frameworks. The partnerships. The capital. The kind of regional vision conversation that turns a list of questions into a plan.
The foundation is there. The community that turned the Pit of All Evil into a place hundreds of thousands of people choose to visit is not a community that lacks the capacity for hard things.
It just needs to decide what comes next, together, with intentionality, and with the long horizon this place deserves.
Matt Small is Director at RVi Planning + Landscape Architecture and publisher of Spark at Ignite Wild. This is Part 2 of The Cuyuna Paradigm, a three-part series examining how communities convert outdoor recreation investment into lasting economic and community value.
References
AirROI. (2026). Crosby, Minnesota Airbnb data 2026: STR report and statistics. https://www.airroi.com/report/world/united-states/minnesota/crosby
Crow Wing County Housing and Redevelopment Authority. (2020). Crow Wing County workforce housing study.
Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED). All-transactions house price index for Crow Wing County, MN. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS27035A
Headwaters Economics. (2020). Housing affordability in recreation counties. https://headwaterseconomics.org/economic-development/equity/housing-affordability-recreation-counties/
Headwaters Economics. The impacts of mountain bike tourism in Oakridge, Oregon. https://headwaterseconomics.org/trail/104-or-mtn-bike-tourism-oakridge/
Placer.ai. Market Overview, Visitor Demographics, Market Demographics, Trade Area, Demand, and Property Variance reports for Cuyuna Trails and Crosby, MN. April 1, 2025 to March 31, 2026.
Scotti, F., Flori, A., Secchi, P., Arena, M., & Azzone, G. (2024). Exploring drivers of overnight stays and same-day visits in the tourism sector. Scientific Reports, 14, Article 9840.
Souza, K. (2025, March 27). Bentonville’s economic impact from events doubled from 2023. Talk Business & Politics.
TripAdvisor. (2026). Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area reviews.
Trust for Public Land. (2025). Economic benefits of mountain biking.
Wang, C., Zhang, J., Cao, J., & Hu, H. (2022). The relationship between place attachment and tourist loyalty: A meta-analysis. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 50, 310-319.
The Cuyuna Paradigm series is grounded in publicly available data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Placer.ai, AirROI, FRED, the Minnesota Design Team, Headwaters Economics, and published reporting from the Star Tribune and other sources. Comparable community analysis draws on published economic impact studies from the Trust for Public Land, Headwaters Economics, and the Outdoor Industry Association.