Pull into the gravel lot on Dodson Street after 6 p.m. some November evening and you'll see the same ritual repeat itself: headlamp on, permit propped against the windshield, tires crunching toward the trailhead everybody around here just calls Sals. Riders have been doing this for years under a fairly simple deal with Salisbury Township. Register once, sign a waiver, and you can ride the singletrack on Lehigh Mountain until 10 p.m. during the fall and winter months.
That deal is now part of a much larger conversation, and the language being used to describe the park's future doesn't obviously include the part where you ride in the dark.
The Sentence That Started the Conversation
In December 2025, the Salisbury Township Environmental Advisory Council sat down with two officials from the Eastern Salisbury Fire Department to talk about what happens next at Walking Purchase Park, the 480-acre tract that sits north of Lehigh Mountain and south of the Lehigh River. The park is jointly run by Salisbury Township, the city of Allentown and Lehigh County, and the three governments have been in talks with Wildlands Conservancy about handing over day-to-day administration entirely.
Michele Lopez, the township's assistant zoning officer and code-rental inspector who chairs the EAC, described what the conservancy has in mind. "They are looking to make it so that everybody has access dawn to dusk," Lopez said.
That phrase, dawn to dusk, is doing a lot of quiet work. Nothing in the reporting from that meeting says night riding is being eliminated. But it's also not the language of an organization planning to keep issuing after-dark parking permits for a technical mountain bike network. EAC Chairperson Maria Rodale asked whether anyone had even done a tree inventory of the park yet. "Has anyone done a tree inventory?" Rodale asked, to which Lopez replied that gathering that information was the goal for 2026. Commissioner Heather Lipkin, the board's liaison to the EAC, made clear how early this all still is. "This is not the only meeting we are going to have about this," Lipkin said. "We would like to present a coherent plan to all our partners. We would have to present it to Allentown and Lehigh County, at minimum, plus Wildlands Conservancy."
As of a township board meeting on June 11, 2026, the transfer was still unresolved. Officials noted that ongoing negotiations over the handoff could delay routine management work in the park, and that Wildlands has indicated it would rather see certain projects finished before it takes ownership, not after.
The Park Down the Road Wildlands Already Runs
If you want a preview of what "dawn to dusk" management looks like in practice, you don't have to guess. Wildlands Conservancy already runs a preserve inside Salisbury Township, and Rodale pointed to it directly as a model. Wildlands opened Black River Sanctuary, across from Franko Farm Park in the township, in October 2024. The sanctuary has about three miles of trails on 187 protected acres, and drew roughly 7,000 visitors for more than 12,000 total visits through September 30, 2025. "Looking at what they did at Black River is a good example," Rodale said.
Three miles of curated hiking trail on 187 acres is a different animal than ten-plus miles of technical singletrack on 480 acres built specifically for mountain bikers. Black River is a preserve you visit. Sals is a trail system you ride hard, sometimes twice a week, sometimes after dark. If the conservancy's own successful playbook becomes the template for Walking Purchase Park, the shift wouldn't just be about who signs the checks. It would be about what kind of place this becomes.
The Trails Built by Volunteers Might Not All Survive the Handoff
The trails at Sals weren't built by any government agency. Every mile of the network was petitioned for, designed and physically constructed by Valley Mountain Bikers, the volunteer club that still maintains it. According to Lehigh County's own trail map, volunteers had already logged more than 5,000 hours of labor by 2009 turning the mountainside into what it is today, at zero cost to the three municipalities that own it.
That history matters now because the master plan review tied to the ownership transfer has flagged real problems with the existing trail footprint. VMB has said publicly that the updated plan identifies two issues serious enough that they may require the club to reroute sections of trail: encroachment onto private property, and trail segments that cross through seeps, the small wetland areas where groundwater surfaces. The club has stressed it has a good working relationship with the officials involved, but the underlying message is straightforward. Some of what you currently ride, including possibly stretches near the Boulder Trail or along the outer perimeter loop that experienced riders finish in 60 to 90 minutes, may not survive the transition in its current form.
Logging the Forest Before Anyone Signs Anything
There's a second thread running alongside the ownership talks that most people who just want to ride after work probably haven't heard about. Salisbury Township has been weighing a timber harvest inside the park, and possibly a prescribed burn to reduce underbrush and drought risk, before any handoff to Wildlands happens.
At the June 2026 meeting, a township official asked whether the estimated value of that timber included the cost of preparing the site and treating it with herbicide afterward. Jon Regan, a forester who has done timber work for the township before, said no, those costs come on top of the harvest and typically run $150 to $200 per acre depending on the terrain, though he noted timber values overall have climbed since the last time the park's wood was appraised. He also flagged something easy to miss: only a portion of whatever revenue the harvest generates would actually belong to Salisbury Township. That's a direct consequence of how the park has been owned since Wildlands originally sold the land in stages, split roughly 50 percent to Lehigh County, 40 percent to Allentown and 10 percent to Salisbury Township, an arrangement that still governs decision-making even though each municipality gets an equal vote regardless of its ownership share.
In plain terms, the township can't just decide to log its own park and pocket the money. Every dollar and every decision has to clear three governments and, soon, a conservation nonprofit that hasn't even taken ownership yet.
What Actually Changes This Season
None of this changes what you can do at Walking Purchase Park right now. Under Salisbury Township's current parks ordinance, the rules at Sals are unchanged while the bigger conversation plays out. Bike riding, leashed dogs and fishing are permitted uses of the park, while the township code explicitly bars ATVs, motorized bikes, campfires outside of designated camping, and overnight parking or stays. One detail that trips up newer visitors: dogs are only permitted on a leash and only on the perimeter trail, not throughout the technical singletrack network.
If you ride at night, the current system still stands too. Every rider is required to submit a waiver form to the township before hitting the trail, night riding remains permitted in fall and winter until 10 p.m., and it's restricted to the Dodson Street lot with a visible parking permit on the dashboard. The EAC has said the broader recommendation to the Board of Commissioners could take four meetings or it could take a year. Nobody involved has put a date on when, or whether, the dawn-to-dusk model actually replaces what exists today.
What's worth watching is the direction of travel. A park built by volunteer mountain bikers for technical, after-dark riding is being evaluated against the standard set by a three-mile nature preserve across town. That's not a bad outcome by definition. Wildlands has a real track record and Black River Sanctuary has clearly found an audience. But it is a different park than the one generations of Sals riders have known, and the people deciding its shape are still meeting in a municipal building on South Pike Avenue, not on the trail itself.
If you've got a stake in how Walking Purchase Park turns out, the EAC's meetings are open to the public and held in the Salisbury Township Municipal Building. Showing up matters more than most residents realize when the decision in question is this early and this unsettled.
We've watched plenty of local debates play out over the years at The Mick Seislove Team, and this is the kind of story that reminds us why we love working in this corner of Lehigh County. If you're curious about anything else happening around Salisbury Township, or just want to talk shop about the neighborhood, reach out any time.
