We are camping with friends in Cuyuna Country State Recreation area, which means that we’ll be getting some great mountain biking in! Since we needed two cars, I was able to leave before the family and get some riding in.

We were there two years ago and that was my introduction to mountain biking.  I didn’t ride a lot of trails that weekend, but this weekend I hope to get quite a bit in.  Today was a good start for that. They have recently opened a bunch of new trails and basically you ride out on some “easy” trails before having options on they way back to the trailhead of staying on the easy or progressing to the harder stuff.  For the most part the harder stuff has a lot of climbing or some steep switchbacks – there are a few more technical side trails or sections that you can bypass as needed.

For the first ride I rode out on Easy Street and then took Mucker Mountain,  Sand Hog Mountain, Hopper Hill, Low Grade, Trammer, Roly Poly, Miners Mountain, Crusher, some Sidewinder, back to the Rally Center and then Switchback (plus the new return trail) to the road and back.   That ended up being almost 13.5 miles.

After lunch at Red Raven (which had an excellent Reuben), I went and setup our campsite.  I was the first one of our group so I had my choice.  Once everything was setup, I realized I had time to do another ride.  So I hopped back on the bike and left from the campground and rode the Drag Line and Haul Road.  It was in the 90’s so it was hard to stay up on hydration.  There are some cool Yurts off Haul Road that had nice cool water! Haul Road and Drag Line make a nice easy loop so that’s what I did.  I decided not to hit Man High or Man Cage yet! When I got back to the campground some friends were there and taking a cool-off dip in the lake so I joined them!  My second ride was about 7 miles.