Question: When is a dirt road a mountain bike trail?
Answer: Sometimes.
Is this a mountain bike trail?
Okay, so when someone says “mountain bike trail” you probably don’t imagine a wide dusty dirt road or a paved greenway path through the city. But if you think about it, these “trails” might just deserve a mention on mountain bike websites like singletracks.
For starters, greenways and fire roads are often good starting places for beginning mountain bikers who either aren’t ready for dirt or don’t have the balance to negotiate narrow singletrack. I’ve recommended “trails” like these to many friends – including rides like the Duke Forest or the American Tobacco trail. Sure, you can ride a road bike on the Tobacco trail but you can’t drive a car (or any other motorized vehicle for that matter) and in my mind that kinda makes it a bike trail.
Similarly, if you can’t ride a road bike on a path because it’s unpaved then it’s pretty safe to call it a mountain bike path. Gold Camp Road (the unpaved part) fits this requirement, plus it’s closed to cars (though motorized dirt bikes do use this area).
If you’ve ever flipped through a FalconGuide to mountain biking (like the Colorado Springs edition) you’ll notice they list plenty of rides that are 100% gravel road rides. The Mountain Biking Colorado Springs book even includes a ride called “Skyline Drive” near Canyon City that is on completely paved and ungated roads (including a nice stretch of US 50). Not that a mention in a book makes it a “real” mountain bike ride, just shows you how liberal you can be with the designation.
So where do you draw the line? Singletrack only? Some doubletrack okay? How about fire roads? In the end it doesn’t really matter – it turns out that a mountain bike trail is anywhere you ride your mountain bike that you think is worth sharing with other riders. It’s also what singletracks is all about.
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We have roads, streets, boulevards, avenues, and interstates. Cars are on all of them. The singletrack I ride might scare the pants off of my eight-year-old and my mom, but that doesn’t mean the wide paths across fields and along the river that they ride on aren’t mountain bike trails.
It would be nice, in my perfect world, if trail maps designated the eight or nine kinds of trails I could imagine. The Falcon Guides kinda attempt this what with their dotted paths and numbered difficulty levels. But it’s not very satisfying since they are usually written by one person, often years ago on a rigid bike; and what the author calls “rugged,” my five-inch travel Titus calls “boring.”
Nevertheless, they are all trails, and they are all for mountain bikes. Just like the Kona Stinky I ride at Diablo is a world away from the carbon XC bike you might ride in Moab.
“what the author calls “rugged,†my five-inch travel Titus calls “boring.—
Hehe, well said.
I agree with these comments too. When I moved to WY a little over a year ago, I picked up the Falcon Guide ‘Mountain Biking Wyoming.’ I was disappointed to find most (>50%, although I haven’t looked recently) of the trails in there to be fire roads and/or Forest Service roads. That is why I’m so intent on finding new trails AND adding them here to singletracks.com. That way people don’t have to be a local or search too hard to find the real dirt.
Part I of this section also stated that to be considered a trail, the trail must have a trailhead. Many hiking/biking/horse trails have a designated trailhead, but many of the dirt road rides in the WY Falcon Guide will not have a trailhead (“just get on these roads and go”). In additon, even around Laramie there are old cow paths turned bike trails that the locals ride regularily. Some are illegal, but some are legal on Forest Service land, etc.
Actually there IS a singletrack next to Skyline Drive in Canon City, tech and fun. Rode it about 9 years ago.