The 10 We Shoulda Picked?

Hubris, if memory serves me right, is a word of Greek origin. The original meaning was something like “to defy the Gods” and if you’re up on your Greek mythology, you know it’s always a bad idea to defy the Gods.

Zeus and those 11 other half-naked deities up on Mount Olympus may look like frumpy, bath-house refugees, but the minute you defied them, they’d strike you dead or make a pair of goat testicles sprout from your forehead in a very unbecoming way…they might even sick Harry Hamlin and an army of badly sculpted clay-mation monsters on your feckless, deity-defying ass... Hubris, every savvy Greek knew, was something best avoided.

At Bike Magazine, we’ve taken a different tack. We embrace hubris. How else could we have picked America’s 10 Best Trails (the cover feature in our December 2004 issue)? Because, really, anyone with an ounce of sense knows that there is no such thing as “the 10 best trails” in America.

Can you really say, for instance, that Moab slickrock is “better” than Vermont singletrack? Sure, you might prefer one type of terrain over the other, but you can’t run the two trails through some massive computer to determine which is objectively superior. I know this because (1) It’s common sense and (2) I’ve received a healthy dose of hate mail from readers telling me so.

For those of you who didn’t read the article, here’s the ADD-version: we picked ten trails as the best in the country (they were listed in a random fashion—we weren’t suggesting that any of the ten trails were better than the others), I wrote a 500-word description on where to find each trail, how to ride it and why it’s worth riding in the first place.

The featured ten were as follows: 1. Imperial Gulch/Ketchum, ID 2. McKenzie River Trail/Eugene, OR 3. Porcupine Rim/Moab, UT 4. Tsali Left Loop/Nantahala, N. Carolina 5. The Edge Loop/Fruita, CO 6. Finger Lakes Trail/Letchworth State Park, NY 7. National Trail/Phoenix, AZ 8. Plantation Trail/Davis, WV 9. Downieville Downhill/Downieville, CA 10. Upper Oil Can/North Vancouver, British Columbia (yeah, I know, this is in CANADA…deal with it)

How and why did we choose these particular trails? After eight years as a magazine writer, I’ve been lucky enough to have ridden all of the country and, thus, have my own list of favorites. I wrote 20 of them down and sent them to the other editors at the magazine.

After a few rounds of rancorous emails we editors collectively pared the list down to ten favorites. I then wrote up the article. Once the article was written a number of mountain bike photographers (these guys travel even more than us writers) looked at the list and said constructive things like “Fisher Creek? You picked Fisher Creek as the best trail in Sun Valley? What are you—some kind of idiot? That’s a puss of a ride. You should write about Imperial Gulch instead!”

I then went back to the drawing board, thought over the criticisms, called up locals and got their opinions, redrew the list, rewrote the article and—voila—an eternity later, the story appeared in the current issue of BIKE. Joy.

Of course, the minute I finished writing the article, I began to second guess myself and came up with yet another 10 Best Trails list. That’s not to say that the trails we picked aren’t great. In fact, I have the issue in front of me, I’m flipping through the pages right now and I still think you could persuasively argue that those are, truly, the 10 Best Trails in the country…but then you run into common sense and hubris and goat testicles and Harry Hamlin and…well, here are 10 More Best Trails that, sure, we coulda picked. Enjoy.

1. North Umpqua Trail/Roseburg, Oregon Pacific Northwest riding at its best. That means lots of singletrack winding through dense, cool, old-growth forests. Another bonus? You can watch the salmon and steelhead struggle up the North Umpqua River during the spawning season, cross a hundred bridges, ride along exposed ledges….there’s a lot to do and see here. When all is said and done, you can configure more than 50 miles of riding on this trail system.

2. Noble Canyon/San Diego, California If you’ve read anything about mountain biking in San Diego county, you’ve probably read about Noble Canyon. Noble is actually a fair drive from the beaches of San Diego (about 45 minutes or so). It’s closer to the little gold mining town of Julian—up in the mountains.

What makes Noble so great? I love the technical, rocky climbs, the desert views from Indian Creek, the blazing descent through oak forests, the shady creek crossings….hell, I love the whole trail. Noble is challenging, remote and beautiful. That about sums up my rationale for mountain biking in the first place. This is another trail that gets a serious beat down from shuttlers, but I think you miss the beauty of this trail when shuttling it since the technical singletrack climb up Indian Creek Trail is a true high point. Ride it, therefore, as a 20-mile loop from the trailhead parking lot on Pine Creek Road.

3. San Juan Trail/San Juan Capistrano, California This is a favorite at BIKE magazine because it’s in our backyard and because you can make the ride as difficult as you want. You can join the legions of full-face types who shuttle the 11-mile singletrack from the top (Blue Jay campground) on weekends or you can He-Man the ride by climbing the many switchbacks and exposed ledges from the bottom (a burly, 22-mile out and back). There are also a ton of spurs that will beat the living crap out of you (like Chiquita) and which are seldom frequented by hikers and other riders.

San Juan is a tough, remote and lonely ride—which is a bit of a miracle considering that it’s a mere half hour-drive from congested I-5, a thousand strip malls and all the other niceties of Orange County. Perhaps my favorite thing about San Juan is that the trail is at its best right after a rainstorm, when the rest of the area’s trails are a mess of peanut butter-grade muck. San Juan is sandy and drains like a sieve. Good stuff. If you go, don’t skid the switchbacks.

4. Little Bear Loop/Flagstaff, Arizona I confess, I haven’t ridden the score of trails that criss-cross and climb Flagstaff’s 9,300-foot tall Mount Elden, but every time I start raving about my favorite Sedona-area rides (the Cathedral and Submarine Rock loops) every Arizona rider within earshot shakes his or her head and tells me that the Little Bear Loop over in Flagstaff is better. They cite the joy and pain of gaining elevation on technical singletrack, of bombing down prime ribbons like Little Bear and Schultz Creek. They also tend to rave about the way the terrain changes from dry, high desert at the base of the mountain to cool ponderosa pine forests and stands of aspen up top. Sounds like heaven to me. I’ll side with the locals on this one.

5. Wasatch Crest Trail /Park City, Utah Moab, Moab, Moab….Yes, everyone should go there at least once in their lives. Great scenery, neat bike shops, good coffee and so on. But honestly, there are plenty of places in Utah I’d go to instead of Moab, including Gooseberry Mesa, Brian Head, Deer Valley (yeah, the resort…it’s great). I’m a big fan of aspens and ridgeline trails, so for my money, I’d hit the Wasatch Crest Trail—a technical 18.5-mile out and back. It’s also a fairly short drive from Salt Lake City. Works for me.

6. The Colorado Trail/Colorado Look, you could easily argue that the 10 best trails in the country reside in this state alone, so instead of debating whether Crested Butte’s 409 Trail is better or worse than Steamboat’s Emerald Mountain Trail, I’ll take the easy route and pick the 70-mile section of the Colorado Trail, flowing from Molas Pass to Durango (the entire trail stretches 468 miles form Denver to Durango). It’ll rip the lungs from your chest, it takes up to four days to complete it…It’s a thousand Hallmark moment meets saddle-sore hell. It’s what we all dream of.

7. Womble Trail/Lake Ouachita, Arkansas One of the best-built trails in the country (you can thank FDR and the Conservation Core for this one) is also one of the least-ballyhooed. Trust me, though, this 29-mile singletrack is the stuff of dreams. Buff, sinewy Ozark mountain singletrack..hell, I’ve run out of trail adjectives at this point, but you get the picture, right? It’s a fair hump from Little Rock (about 90 miles), but it’s worth it. An added plus: you’ll probably have it all to yourself. Not a ton of traffic on this one.

8. Trace Ridge/Pisgah National Forest, North Carolina A lot of people bitched at me about picking Tsali over Pisgah in the Best Trails feature. I picked Tsali because we’d already selected a ton of technical trails and there’s something to be said for a fast, middle-ring rollercoaster of a ride, but if you like you’re riding technical, rocky and eroded, you can forget all about Tsali and head over to Pisgah. Pisgah has the goods. I’m loathe to pick a favorite. Take a few days off and ride Trace Ridge, Wilson Ridge and Black Mountain trails. Bring some Bactine and Band-Aides. You’ll need them.

9. Big Chair/Ithaca, New York If I didn’t have so much family over here in Northern California, I might have moved to Ithaca for good. For three years (while I lived in Buffalo), this was my favorite place to ride. Big Chair is one of the many rides over in Hammond Hill (a short drive from town). It’s fairly remote, it’s heavily wooded, it’s twisty and it’s full of short, mellow climbs and outrageously fun descents.

This is western New York, so there are also a ton of fallen trees and log-overs to hop over. Overall, though, it’s just a ton of good, cross-country singletrack. If you find Big Chair too easy, you can cross the road and ride Area 51 (it was still there the last time I rode the place, anyway): a playground of shore-style ladder bridges. Get your freeride on, if that’s your bag.

10. Sun Top Loop/Seattle (kinda-sorta), Washington 16-miles of roller coaster singletrackin’. Sweeping vistas of mighty Mount Rainier. Scary, wet, fast and root-infested, white knuckle descents paired with long, lung-searing climbs (3,200-feet of altitude gain). What else is there to say? This is simply one of the best rides in Pacific Northwest. I’d write more, but I need to stop, get up and make some coffee.