Here is a brief ride report of a neat place that I rode with my brother this past week. It is tucked away in an area that you would not necessarily recognize as a good place to ride, but it is outstanding and the conditions have been great the 2x I rode there.
I learned about this place on Twin Tier Sleddin' message board: Bear Spring Mountain in Downsville, NY. It is about 65 Miles from where I live.
My brother and I met at 9AM and rode about 100 miles, done by about 315PM. We stopped for gas (once) and Food (15 minutes - we both hate to sit for 2 hours to eat) in addition to some time to deal with a few "other issues."
I have to say that this area is beautiful Take 17E to exit 90, then Rt 30 to Trout Creek. You come right into the trailhead.
Here is a shot of Rt 30 and the East Branch of the Delaware river to give you a flavor for the terrain.
Easy Parking. Serves as a drop point for sleds in the winter to ride the snowmobile trails and for horses in the summer . . . the trails are used for horseback riding. Glad they are not shared trails, imagine those "trail hazards"!
But before we go, I have to check my suspension bolt!
Note - see
http://www.snowmobilefanatics.com/forum/topic/85638/display.aspx?post=867884 to see why this matters!
Ready to go now . . .
One thing you will see is alot of these:
Here is an example of a hill from an opposite hill. I drew in what we could see of the trail using that yellow line . . .
Here are some sleds going up a one of the hardest trails - a 45* incline in some spots -
Sometimes people end up having to make blind short stops which cause them to be hit from behind by no fault of either party. Such is steep blind trails. I just don't know what my taillight did to deserve this.
Well, I could have been pissed, but I knew something would have to break along the way. So we got this out of the way in the first 10 miles.
Here is a hill we rode down to get gas:
Now here are some pics of trail conditions:
Seasonal road - 3 - 4 miles at 55 MPH (because I always go the speed limit only)
Simply perfect - almost all trails were groomed, one was groomed and not ridden on at all, with powder. We were among the first on the trails. A few people out and we beat the trails silly with the temps where they were:
WOW!
So as you can see, things were just beautiful. Then on one of these steep trails, my brother hears a funny thump from under the hood:
Uh oh, I guess we did not have that out of our system. This was interesting because it did not fully break. So we were near the car (never too far from the cars) and went down, cut off the old one and put on the new one.
We then rode another 30 miles and called it a day.
Got very warm. It was the open visor, open coat kind of warm.
I really encourage you to try this place, it is a great time. You need to understand that the trails are nice but it is very challenging riding. A few wide open seasonal roads, but most is like boon-docking on a groomed trail. It was a ton of fun and you can see that since we did 100 miles in a little over 5 hours it was FAST!
Hope you enjoyed seeing this!
