If we here at Singletracks know anything, it’s mountain bike trails. We’ve given you the Top 10 Mountain Bike Destinations in North America, and even the Top 10 Mountain Bike Cities in North America. But there exists a class of destinations that isn’t quite developed enough in trail mileage or sheer grandness factor to make our top 10 destinations list. (That, and there are just so many great places to choose from!) However, many of these smaller destinations are still uber-popular, due to the really great riding they provide and their proximity to major metropolitan areas.
In this article, we’re rounding up 10 of the best weekend mountain bike getaways in the United States.
For our first criterion, these destinations don’t, for the most part, have that much singletrack mileage to offer. If you’re reasonably fit and you take a long 3-day weekend, you can probably explore most of these weekend destinations in their entirety. But despite the confined area, the riding in all of these places is renowned and raved about by the locals. Sure, you could go to a place like Moab or Whistler for a weekend, but you’d barely scratch the surface, and would ultimately do yourself and the wealth of amazing riding there a disservice. We’ve left such places out of the running
The second criterion is that the destination must be relatively close to a major metropolitan area. We s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d the distances on a few of these, but generally speaking we limited the driving distance calculations to cities of 100,000 or more within 6 or less hours one-way.
1. Brown County State Park, Nashville, Indiana
Visit here if you live in:
- Indianapolis, IN: 1-hour drive
- Louisville, KY: 1hr 20min
- Cincinnati, OH: 2hr
- Columbus, OH: 3hr 30min
- Chicago, IL: 4hr
- Nashville, TN: 4hr
- St. Louis, MO: 4hr 15min
- Detroit, MI: 5hr
- Cleveland, OH: 5hr 30min
- Pittsburgh, PA: 6hr
Brown County State Park in Indiana is home to over 30 miles of extremely well-built trails, ranging in difficulty from easy to advanced. This section of Indiana might surprise you, with quite a bit of elevation change thanks to the never ending up-down-up-down of the hills. In fact, one of the GPS tracks submitted to Singletracks for Brown County–totalling 31.3 miles in length–racks up 4,466+ feet of climbing! Spend the weekend here exploring these great trails, and enjoy convenient camping right in the same state park.
