Smoothly pedaling under a canopy of trees along the Little Miami River. A bumpy descent over rocks and tree roots on the Tower Park off-road trail. A bike-friendly stop for a post-ride coffee or beer. Outdoor trails and gathering spots are an underrated asset in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky—but Brian Bozeman, founder of Cincitucky Trails, wants to change that.
“We’ve got hundreds of miles of trails, how do we tell that story?” Bozeman says.
Bozeman began engaging with area business leaders, tourism organizations and bike trail advocates to create a unified voice for the region's outdoor scene.
“We wanted to get the local riding community excited about this, so we linked arms with Julie Kirkpatrick, president and CEO of meetNKY who partnered with us to create the Cincitucky Trails brand,” Bozeman says.
After multiple design iterations with local firm Dewhaus, the brand emerged with a vibrant bright blue and orange logo to accompany its name, making trail components easy to identify.
“Our goal is to get this colorway and signage across the community to identify this place,” Bozeman says. “We wanted it to be a bit edgy and unique to us. We want this to stick and be memorable.”
Bozeman likens the branding effort to Kentucky's Bourbon Trail.
“The Bourbon Trail is not an actual trail. It is an ethereal thing that links up disparate amenities and tells a bigger story,” he explains. “In a similar way, Cincitucky Trails is not rebranding any specific trail, it’s amplifying the voice of all those things, bringing it under one brand to promote the region as an outdoor destination. The outdoor culture of our region has always needed a name and a voice, and now it has one.”
The idea for the brand first came to Bozeman during a mountain biking trip to Bentonville, Arkansas. Bentonville sits within Oz Trails, a vast network of 550 miles of soft-surface, shared-use trails that earned the region the title of Mountain Biking Capital of the World.
“It was really cool to see the connectivity of the trails down there,” he says. “They wanted Bentonville to be a place you wanted to live, not a place you had to live.”
"As we start to consider how we attract talent to the region, we have been more thoughtful about the quality-of-life attributes that we have that helps talent 'stick,'" Kirkpatrick says. "The same stickiness that brings visitors to check us out is the same stickiness that gets someone thinking about moving and putting down roots here."
Recognizing a similar challenge in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, Bozeman, whose day job is VP of business development at construction company Skanska, saw an opportunity.
“I feel like everywhere I go, the conversation is about how to get more talent here. How do we prevent brain drain?” he asks.
On a more personal level, he hopes this work will make the region a place his five children choose to stay when they grow up.
Years of effort from Cincinnati Off-Road Alliance (CORA), Tri-State Trails and other organizations have made replicating Oz Trails’ success more feasible, as much of the network is already established. Bozeman likens the process to an amusement park, explaining that these groups are building the rides, while Cincitucky Trails is creating the experience. He adds that the region has another distinct advantage—its proximity to the urban core, offering easy access to outdoor recreation for residents and visitors alike.
“People move to places like Denver and Asheville and other ‘outdoor destinations’ only to find when they get there that they need to drive 30 minutes to get outdoors,” Bozeman says. “Here, you can take a lunch break from your corporate job downtown and go shred or run on a trail.”
With the brand now launched, Bozeman is focused on building momentum through partnerships and growing grassroots energy. He envisions transformational projects in the region that Cincitucky Trails will promote.
“Cincitucky is a place that many of us have lived our entire lives and have never really seen–a place that we all believe in but have hidden from the outside world,” Bozeman says. “Cincitucky will change the way we think of ourselves as an outdoor destination and will change the way the world sees us.”