After many hours of skulking around on the Internet I found some promising places to ride near me. The only catch was the torrential down pour over the last day. After riding through one of the state forests earlier I knew anything in it or low lying areas would be a swamp. So that left me with one area close enough to bother with. All the trail reviews agreed that it was one of the best trail systems to hit up around here. Spent a few hours finding some GPS info and ride descriptions and off I went:
Now ever state has its own style of trails. MA is no different. Here there are four main features. Rocks: There are tons of rocks. Big, small, long, tall. The worst kind is the moss covered monolith which can go for thirty feet of trail. Tread lightly or you are going down...you will never be on a level incline when you encounter them. Moss: This wasn't bad but when added to the rocks, it was a bit tricky. Roots: Again like the moss it isn't a problem, but normally you'd get a large root system in the middle of a rocky section. One screw up and you were hiking. Good day sir. Last but not least my favorite Leaves: You'd assume these guys would be slick, obscure the trail, or all in all just annoy you. Except they were mostly off of the trail. For some reason these leaves were just DEEP. If you went off trail at all good luck. Chances of sinking up to six inches into some unseen rock crevice was pretty much a guarantee.
So are all MA trails like this? Nope, just the hiking or double track. If you hunt hard enough (and they are hidden for a reason) you will find single track. Well maintained, easily ride able (most of the time) single track. I'd say of the 15.5 miles today I only did about 5 miles of single track. According to all the maps and chit chat online I missed another 1-2miles. Now this was if I had wanted to hike-a-bike probably double that distance along a questionable ridge trail. Normally I would be all about that... I found out early on in my ride that bike shoes + slick rocks = no good times. So I passed.
Olivia was nice enough to give me a place to park to start my ride. Parking around here was a bit sparse, but since people normally only stop 5-10min to look at the vista you are pretty safe finding a spot:
Olivia's Outlook wasn't bad...but some NY people did whine about "oh I thought there would be much more of a drop off". I thought It best not to tell them to hike their lazy butts up the ridge to the fire tower for the real view:
This is a very vague idea of what MA has to offer for trails. Granted this is a hiking trail, but you can see a little bit of everything it has to offer. The single track was in a bit better shape when I happened upon it:
Power line corridors offered up some nice views:
Hike-a-biked for this shot. Turns out when the trail said it was just a "hiking path" it was right....unless you were some kind of mountain goat with a trials bike and tires made of a super sticky material. At this point I turned around and started my return trip to the car:
Once I found the single track it dumped you out onto some nice overlooks. Messed with my camera's timer a bit and got this nice Alex style self portrait shot. Note to self, smile next time:
Every trip I try to finish it off with a staple meal. In this case some whole grain bread and flank steak washed down with a blue moon. yum:
All in all a good trip to MA. Obviously more for the roadies out here. The single track is too hard to find to just make a mountain biking trip out of it. Ended up skipping my gap ride up in VT so I could scope out the mountain biking trails around here. After all I'm still in my mid cycling career crisis of mt bike vs road.
::::ride stats::::
time: 2:40:18
distance: 15.61 miles
climbing: 2786ft
No comments:
Post a Comment