With eight of its ski areas spinning lifts in the summer, Idaho boasts more lift-accessed bike parks than its Pacific Northwest neighbors of Washington (two), Oregon (two), and Montana (three) combined. But for all its big-bike bona fides, Idaho’s bike park culture remains low-key even while it’s fully pinned, with an emphasis on the singletrack rather than the scene. These top 10 trails represent the no-frills, all-thrills nature of Gem State gravity riding.
Expert
Franknbeans, Silver Mountain Bike Park
Silver Mountain Bike Park boasts a staggering 3,500 feet of vert, accessible via North America’s longest gondola. Do a couple top-to-bottom laps here and you’ll have your hands plastered to the grips and a grin plastered to your face. There’s a reason the park’s signature bike event, the North American Enduro Cup, has been able to attract top names like Jill Kintner and Cody Kelley to North Idaho year after year. But even its shorter trails give riders plenty to chew on (or be chewed up by). Franknbeans sums up Silver’s characteristic charms: steep sidehills, snarling, off-camber roots, and unrelenting chunder. With trails like Franknbeans, it doesn’t take a top-to-bottom run to get worked.
Smoke Jumper, Tamarack Bike Park
If the list here skews toward tech, there’s a reason: Idaho’s gravity-racing legacy has spawned numerous beloved big-hit trails. At Tamarack Bike Park, twenty minutes south of the lakeside mountain town (or is it a mountainside lake town?) of McCall, some two decades of DH racers have revered trails such as Smoke Jumper. The black-diamond track plunges riders down the smooth dirt and slabby granite characteristic of southwest Idaho, with the occasional root tangle tossed in. And the optional but iconic rock rolls and drops never go out of style.
Blondie, Grand Targhee Resort
Although located just across the border in Wyoming, Grand Targhee is only accessible via Driggs, Idaho. Both states claim the mountain (locals refer to the area as “Wydaho“), and trails like Blondie demonstrate why. Named after Clint Eastwood’s iconic spaghetti western role, Blondie is as craggy and intimidating as that character’s stare. Pushing the boundaries of a single-black rating, Blondie burns off elevation quickly: over 1,300 vertical feet in just over a mile of root tangles, loam, and loose scree. Several of the more sustained pitches will smoke all but the biggest rotors.
Hobo Juice, Basin Gravity Park
Bogus Basin Ski Area outside Boise broke ground on its gravity trails five years ago, and while the park boasts plenty of modern machine-built highlights like Air Traffic Control and Student Rider (see below), Hobo Juice keeps it old-school. Descending away from the Morning Star Express chairlift into the 40 Acres of Freedom zone, Hobo Juice mixes steep, squirrelly chutes with chunky rock gardens, capped off by the double-black Apple Pucker roll. Numerous road crossings allow riders to section off and session as much or as little as they’d like.
Intermediate
High Point, Schweitzer
In addition to adding trails to its own network at a quick clip over the last several years, the North Idaho resort of Schweitzer has worked tirelessly with the City of Sandpoint and other agencies to build a sprawling network of trails in the Little Sand Creek Basin below the resort boundaries. From its Summit House, Schweitzer’s High Point trail commences a nearly 4,000-foot descent from subalpine to cedar forest with accompanying views of Lake Pend Oreille far below. In mid- to late-summer, bring a spare water bottle to fill up with the upper basin’s plentiful trailside huckleberries.
Brundage-to-Bear Basin, Brundage Mountain Resort
Like Schweitzer’s High Point, the Brundage-to-Bear Basin (B2BB) trail ties a resort to its home community, both literally and figuratively. And like High Point, the views of a glittering city shoreline astound—here, Payette Lake and the waterfront mountain town of McCall. Connecting to the top of Brundage via the talus and stacked berms of Rock Garden and Lakeview Vista, B2BB cruises through open meadows and stands of aspen to the Bear Basin trail system on the edge of town, some 2,500 vertical feet below. Ambitious riders can pedal up the trail for a half-day human-powered epic.
Monumental, Soldier Mountain Bike Park
With only five trails and 800 feet of vert, the mom-and-pop Soldier Mountain, located outside the farming community of Fairfield in southern Idaho, punches above its weight class. Monumental links together a series of tabletops on sandy, occasionally narrow sidehill before dropping into the small root sections—many of them gappable—of the loamy lower mountain. Visit early in the season for one of the better trailside wildflower displays in the region.
Beginner
Student Rider, Basin Gravity Park
Mountain bikers have entered a golden age of green trails. Gone are the days of newer riders being stuck on spruced-up service roads that advanced riders would avoid at all costs; in recent years, trail builders have figured out how to build trails that flow—and hold interest—at any speed. Student Rider, at Bogus Basin Ski Area’s Basin Gravity Park, just outside Boise, epitomizes this new-school approach: a consistent pitch, confidence-building berms, and just enough airtime to keep riders coming back for more. Even experienced riders will find themselves sessioning it for fun and not just out of A-to-B necessity.
Pura Vida, Tamarack Bike Park
The best green trails hit that sweet spot for beginners between cruising and careening out of control, where they can safely experience the thrill of letting off the brakes and letting gravity take hold. Tamarack’s Pura Vida nails that sensation: low-angle but not low-interest, playful but not pedally, and with plenty of side hits and sneaky alternate lines for the tagalong parent or more seasoned rider.
Chutes and Ladders, Grand Targhee Resort
With its beginner-focused Shoshone chairlift, Grand Targhee has embraced skills progression. Accessing a handful of short green and light-blue machine-built trails, the Shoshone chair lets riders level up without the intimidation factor or commitment of mountaintop off-loading next to expert riders. Chutes and Ladders strings together a series of berms, medium tabletops, and small wall rides, all with consistent, predictable entrances and exits. It’s an ideal trail for beginners learning to get off the ground or off-axis. And for those expert riders, Chutes and Ladders offers a playful palette cleanser after the rotor-warping roots and rocks of Blondie.
Honorable mention
Pounder, Pomerelle Mountain Resort
If Pomerelle feels like a rambunctious backyard build, that’s essentially what it is. The trails represent the work of members of the family that has owned this small ski area in far southern Idaho for several generations. Unmarked, unpretentious, and unrelenting, the hand-cut trails peak in difficulty with locally legendary “Pounder.” The Pounder course warms up riders with a mix of skidders and skinned-timber berms before getting progressively steeper and faster, culminating in the pinball-like fall-line dry creek bed bottom section.
Although Pomerelle no longer operates its chairlift except for one weekend a year, during the annual Pomerelle Pounder stop on the Utah Gravity Series, riders can easily self-shuttle the trails via a paved Forest Service road.
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