Copper Harbor has 136 residents and more than 50 miles of singletrack. Riders drive in from three states to get to it. And nearly every sign, brochure and website still advertises a designation that stopped existing last October.
The International Mountain Bicycling Association retired its Gold, Silver and Bronze Ride Center medals on October 22, 2025. There is no Silver tier anymore. Copper Harbor has been Silver since 2012, everyone local still says it, and the clock on reapplying under the new system runs out next month.
What actually replaced it
IMBA’s new structure has two levels: Ride Center, which needs 60-plus miles and three of four badges, and Premier Ride Center, which needs 100 miles and all four. Existing centers were given a 12-month extension to reapply, at $250 plus $7,500 plus expenses. Until they do, IMBA’s own language is that “they won’t earn any Badges.”
That window closes around October 2026. Nothing about the trails changed. The scoreboard did.
Worth noting what Silver meant while it existed: IMBA’s 2018 list had 39 Ride Centers, six of them Gold. Michigan never had a Gold. Copper Harbor was Silver and Marquette was Bronze, and coverage that calls the Keweenaw system world-class has generally been rounding up.
Nobody actually owns these trails
This is the part that gets left out, and it is the most remarkable thing about the place.
The Copper Harbor Trails Club does not own the ground its network runs on. In the club’s own words, “our trails are located on both public and private land.” The system is stitched together from four separate legal instruments: a license agreement with Grant Township, permits with the Michigan DNR for state forest land, a trail easement covering more than a dozen miles on Keweenaw Mountain Lodge property, and arrangements with private landowners.
A 136-person village built a nationally known trail system on land it does not control. It holds together because four different parties keep saying yes.
What happens when one of them says no
In December 2021, five trails closed. Danimal, Flying Squirrel, Downtown, Overflow and Stairway to Heaven, roughly three miles, shut down because Keweenaw County’s insurer demanded a $5 million liability policy instead of the standard $1 million. Two private landowners revoked access the same season.
County Board Chairman Don Piche put it plainly at the time: the insurance company said if the county did not do something, it might lose its coverage or see premiums go through the roof.
It was not a land manager or a conservation dispute that closed those trails. It was an underwriter. The fix came in April 2022, when Keweenaw Mountain Lodge owner John Mueller bought the county parcels outright and donated a trails easement to the club.
The bigger land question resolves this October
A New York hedge fund, the Rohatyn Group, owned more than a third of Keweenaw County. The Nature Conservancy has been buying it out, including 22,700 acres for $27.2 million that closed in October 2022.
That land is moving to the Michigan DNR right now, in two phases: roughly 10,000 acres closing in August 2026 and the remainder in October. It is the largest change in who owns the Keweenaw in a generation, and it is happening while the trail club waits on a paperwork deadline of its own.
If you are going
The 33rd Copper Harbor Trails Fest runs this weekend out of Donny Kilpela Memorial Park, with the enduro and a 10K trail run on Sunday.
There is no chairlift, despite how often it gets described that way. Keweenaw Adventure Company runs a van shuttle, and the 2026 shop season closes October 18. Fall color in the northern Keweenaw typically peaks from the last week of September into the first two weeks of October, and Copper Harbor runs a little later than the southern end of the peninsula.
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