During early twentieth century inland northern Sweden was still very sparsely populated and sufficient communications were lacking. Many settlements, which were scattered over the forest landscape, could only be reached by simple foot-paths. The few public roads followed the great rivers and connected inland areas to the coast. However, many villages remained isolated from one another due to poor communication. As a consequence winter was the only time that heavy goods could be transported and the time when all logging activities took place. With time the Swedish forestry required better communications in the forests also during summer-time, to effectively manage the forest areas that had already been logged. The Swedish Government realized the need of a developed infrastructure in order to prevent people from the two northernmost counties of Norrbotten and Västerbotten of moving to the more developed regions by the coast. The answer to these concerns seemed to be construction of so called bike trails. These trails were only about a meter wide, but stable enough to allow for traffic by bicycles. In this talk I will discuss the factors leading to this development, the extent of the bike trail network and the factors that led to its termination by presenting the history of a few cases of bike trail construction both from field inventories, archival sources and interviews with people that came into contact with these trails.