HELENA, Mont. — There’s something special about the dirt in Helena, Montana.

“Helena has magic dirt,” said Emmett Purcell, volunteer trails coordinator for the Prickly Pear Land Trust and avid mountain biker.

That magic dirt makes for great trails in Helena’s South Hills, for both mountain biking and hiking. When the trails are dry, they turn to hardpack, rather than getting dusty and loose. When they’re wet, they’re tacky rather than slick or gumbo-y.

“We almost don’t have mud,” Purcell said.

Dirt like that is hard to find. But it’s not just the dirt that’s turning Helena into a destination for mountain bikers.

Helena’s trail system begins moments from downtown and offers 75 miles of trails. New trails are being built every year. A shuttle is available to take mountain bikers to less accessible trailheads, and the riding season in Helena runs from March to September.

“Our season is surprisingly long,” Purcell said.

Helena has been working to capitalize on its trails and to turn the town into a destination for mountain bikers.

Helena’s South Hills trail system has been around for a long time, but up until recently no one had worked to market those trails, said Pat Doyle, who previously worked for Bike Helena, which is part of the Helena Tourism Alliance, and now volunteers with the group.

The Helena Tourism Alliance launched Bike Helena, an effort to brand Helena as a biking destination, in spring of 2013.

“Our main goal is to get heads in beds,” said Heidi O’Brien, executive director of the Helena Tourism Alliance and Bike Helena.

While it’s hard to know exactly how many people have visited Helena and stayed in hotels because of the Bike Helena campaign, indications show it’s working.

“It’s hard to get hotels to track those things,” O’Brien said.

However, in talking to trail users, it’s clear that people are traveling to Helena to ride the trails.

“We see a lot of people from Bozeman coming up to use our trails,” O’Brien said.

Canadians also stop to ride when passing through, Doyle said.

In 2014, the year after Bike Helena launched, hotel occupancy increased 1.5 percent.

“That was a nonlegislative year,” Doyle said.

The same year the Helena Tourism Alliance created Bike Helena, Helena was designated as a Ride Center by the International Mountain Bicycling Association.

“That’s IMBA’s thumbs up that you’re a world-class mountain biking destination,” Doyle explained.

Getting that thumbs up isn’t an easy process. There are currently 27 IMBA Ride Centers worldwide. Helena is the only community in Montana with the designation.

Communities must be invited to apply.

After getting an invitation, the application takes about 40 hours to complete, Doyle said. Then IMBA sends a couple representatives to spend three days in the town, checking out the trails and seeing what else the community has to offer.

“IMBA actually sends people up here to ride as tourists,” Doyle said. “They pretty much rode our entire South Hills trail system.”

They also ate at restaurants, visited breweries and stayed in hotels.

“It’s not just an experience solely based on riding,” Doyle said.

Basically, IMBA wants to see whether there’s enough riding and after-ride entertainment to fill a three-day trip.

The Bicycling Association determined that Helena did in fact qualify and gave the city a bronze Ride Center designation. Last week, that was upgraded to silver.

Earning IMBA’s Ride Center status didn’t change Helena overnight, Doyle said. However, it has helped attract more riders to the Queen City.

“This has become a major marketing tool for us,” Doyle said.

“It’s been huge for us to have that credibility,” O’Brien added.

The designation has earned Helena recognition in mountain biking magazines, on websites and on top mountain bike destination lists.

In addition to attracting visitors, Purcell also sees Helena’s trails attracting people to move to Helena and keeping residents there.

“The whole quality-of-life picture is kind of coming full circle in Helena,” he said.

While Helena has been working to attract more out-of-towners to its trail system, the bulk of the users are locals.

“The locals are definitely the ones who support the program through and through,” O’Brien said of Helena’s bike shuttle.

That shuttle got its start about 10 years ago. Supported by the Downtown Business Improvement District and the Helena Area Transit System, the original idea behind the shuttle was to bring more people downtown on Saturdays when downtown tended to be pretty quiet, Purcell said.

In its first years, the shuttle, which went from downtown to area trailheads, was mainly used by hikers.

“The first year, I was the only biker on it for weeks and weeks,” Purcell said.

That has slowly changed. Now, it’s usually about half hikers and half mountain bikers. It’s also popular with trail runners.

The Trail Rider Shuttle has so grown in popularity that it now runs five days a week.

“It started out as Saturday only,” Purcell said.

The shuttle now runs Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings, as well as Saturday and Sunday mornings.

The shuttle is an old city bus with a trailer that’s been retrofitted to carry bikes.

For many locals, the shuttle is an extra perk of Helena’s trail system.

Chris Mast, of Helena, rides the shuttle about once a week.

“It’s just so easy,” he said.

On a recent Wednesday evening, he took the Trail Rider Shuttle to the Helena Ridge trailhead and rode his bike back into town. That gave him a roughly 8-mile ride on singletrack trails.

Mast is often busy with his kids and has to squeeze mountain biking into a full schedule. If it weren’t for the shuttle, he wouldn’t have time to ride the entire ridge trail.

Helena’s trails are laid out to make it easy for riders to finish their rides downtown where the shuttle picks up.

On Friday night, the shuttle takes riders to the top of MacDonald Pass, where they can ride a portion of Continental Divide Trail.

“It’s one of our favorite trails,” Purcell said.

Growing Helena’s trail system and its mountain biking community while also promoting the trails to visitors hasn’t been without hurdles. Many members of the community and organizations have helped with the efforts.

You might say it feels a little like magic, kind of like that magic dirt from which the trails are made.

If you don’t believe in magic, then maybe it was a lot of hard work that has turned Helena into a mountain biking destination.

As for the magic in the dirt, it’s actually limestone. Lime kilns still line some of the roads outside town, relics from the days that Helena produced some of the best lime in the country and turned it into bricks.

“Back in the day it was for building bricks,” Purcell said. “Now it’s for building trails.”