BMX Racing History · Track File · Legend Bike Co

Apple Valley BMX Moto Park: The High Desert Track That Outlived Three Sanctions

Nearly every track in this series is a past-tense story. Houses on the old start hill. A flood basin filled in. A lease that ran out and a landowner who wanted the dirt back. Apple Valley is a different kind of entry, because the gate is still dropping. It sits off Highway 18 in the San Bernardino County high desert, inside a town-owned horse park, and by the owner's record it has been running since 1974.

That date is the interesting part, and it comes with a question the record cannot close.

A 1974 Track, and the Question That Follows

1974 is early. To put it in company: Sarasota BMX in Florida also dates to 1974, and Sarasota County celebrated the track's 50th year in 2024. Sarasota holds the claim of the oldest continuously operating BMX track in America. Chandler BMX in Arizona opened in 1977, became ABA Track 001, and holds a different claim — the longest continuously operating track under a single sanction, still on its original ground.

Apple Valley does not beat either of them, and this page is not going to suggest it does. Both of those claims turn on continuity, not on an opening date. Nobody has produced an unbroken operating record for Apple Valley, and the owner has never claimed one. A track can open in 1974, go quiet for a stretch, change hands, and come back, and that history would still be worth telling. It just would not be the same claim.

The Chandler comparison falls away for a second reason. Apple Valley changed sanctions twice. Whatever else it is, it is not a single-sanction track, so that particular record was never on the table.

There is also a wrinkle in the location. A third-party travel listing, carrying promotional copy lifted from the track's own earlier website, says the track has been in the same spot since the early 1980s. That is not necessarily a contradiction of 1974, since a track can open in one place and move to another a few miles away, and plenty did. But it means the 1974 date and the Horseman's Center site are two separate facts, and we can only firmly attach one of them to the ground it sits on today.

Three Sanctions, Seen From Ground Level

The sanction arc is the spine of this track's story, and it happens to be a clean way to watch BMX consolidate from the bottom up.

Apple Valley started as an NBL track. George Esser founded the National Bicycle League out of Florida in 1974, the same year the track opened, and the NBL spent most of its life as the East Coast power while the West went a different way. A California track flying an NBL flag was never the obvious choice, and Bill Ryan's record has Apple Valley hosting NBL Nationals during that period.

Then it converted to the ABA. That move is the whole story of the late 1970s and 1980s in one track. The American Bicycle Association incorporated out of Chandler, Arizona on October 13, 1977, and inside a few years it was the biggest sanction in the country. Tracks switched. Apple Valley was one of them, and it was hardly alone — Azusa ran ABA and NBL layouts side by side for a stretch in the mid-1980s rather than pick.

Then, in 2011, the ABA and the NBL merged and became USA BMX. For most tracks that was a paperwork event. For a track that had already raced under both parents, the merger closed a loop. Apple Valley races under USA BMX today, and its listing in the sanction's track directory is current.

Very few tracks anywhere have carried all three. Most of the tracks in Chapter 10 were gone before the merger was ever discussed. Saddleback closed in 1984. Corona ran roughly a decade. Palms Park made it to 1984. The Orange Y lasted forty years and still shut down in 2016.

The Ground

The track sits inside Horseman's Center, an 80-acre park owned by the Town of Apple Valley, set among rock formations on the desert floor. The town's own description of the park lists two horse show arenas, a playground, perimeter hiking trails, seven primitive campsites, and the BMX park. It is a municipal park with a BMX track in it, not a purpose-built race facility, which is worth saying plainly because it shapes everything about how the place has been run.

High desert dirt is its own problem. It is dry, it moves, and summer daytime temperatures make an afternoon race day unworkable for a good part of the year. The track carries lights, which is not decoration in that climate.

2008, and the Rebuild

Bill Ryan took the track over in 2008 and has run it as a non-profit since. By his own published account, the track was headed for closure and the town's problem was liability rather than interest: too much trouble with the general public running it, and a need for a business to step in and carry the risk.

In 2009 the track was rebuilt from the ground up by track builder Billy Allen, with Kris Fox and Mikey Brabandt helping lay out the new design. That rebuild is the one piece of the modern era with independent corroboration. The 2009 date and Allen's name appear in the track's own promotional copy as syndicated to outside listings, and the Town of Apple Valley's park page refers to a renovated BMX park under a new operator.

Since then the day-to-day has passed through a run of operators and volunteer families: the Sennetts, the Schraders, the Hammond family, and the Sutmans. That is the ordinary shape of a community track, and it is the part that almost never makes the record anywhere. Nobody writes down who dragged the gate.

Where the Record Runs Thin