There are quite a number of good extended bike trips in the area -Miles Standish State Forest, Cape Cod Canal, Nickerson State Park (Brewster, Cape Cod, right on the CC rail trail), Lexington/Concord RtT, Northampton RtT. I’ll post more on these later. Here is a list of MA trails: http://www.massbike.org/bikeways/

Here is a map of the local rail trail in Milford. It is meant to form a large loop through the surrounding towns. That will be a nice ride someday. rail-trail.ppt

If you are interested in mountain biking, a good place to start is: http://www.nemba.org/ridingzone/places.html

This is the trail section of the New England Mountain Biking Assoc. These guys do quite a lot to promote MB activity. They purchased 47 acres of property near our town and created one of the premier single track rides in the northeast – Vietnam.

Here is a link for the info available on that area: http://www.nemba.org/Articles/Vietnam/NEMBAsVietnamProperty.html

Located off 495 at the Rt. 85 exit, it is great ride for a number of reasons – it’s challenging, well maintain & planned, it’s diverse, it’s meant to be ridden, and it is easy to get to.

What I also like that many people don’t know about is the ride across the street from this area. I’ll call it the Wildcat Pond area. I’ve attached a few topo maps for reference, but what you do is take the obvious trailhead into this area, maybe with compass or map in hand. Back here you’ll discover a number of old rock quarries. Some show signs of teenage abuse, but they are really quite interesting to search out and find. You can also pedal to Echo Lake, the source of the Charles River.

These trails eventually come out on Lumber St. and Granite St. in Hopkinton. Another connected ride is to take the trails from Vietnam into the College Rock area. (Where we often start to enter the Vietnam area). College Rock is a beginner rock climbing opportunity if you want to do that with your troop. Right in front of the rock is a Kiosk built as an eagle scout project.

I’ve attached maps of College Rock, Echo Lake, Wilcat Pond, and Vietnam. The Vietnam map is a bit useless except just to get a generally sense of the trail flow. NEMBA does not have a better map. The trails aren’t really marked so it won’t do too much good anyway. Furthermore, the sound of 495 always gives you a sense of SW. The topo maps attached show some trails, but there are a lot more trails out there. I used these to create maps of all the trails but I never transposed back to electronic format after surveying the area.

bikemap1.ppt

Another idea for a local quality mountain bike ride is to go over to Blue Hills Reservation, just south of Boston. Blue Hills has some nice single track routes and it is also loaded with geocaches. Views from the top of the hill are very cool. Stay over at BSA’s Camp Sayre right on the reservation. A nice low logistics, action filled campout.  Another benefit is the Minuteman Council Egan Rec center is right at Camp Sayre and it has a pool. If this gets you excited, call ahead to make sure the pool heaters are working. When we went, the water was freezing. Here is a map of camp of Camp Sayre as well as a mountain biking discussion from ragemtb.com:

campsayre.pdf

blue-hills.doc

photo credit:New England Mountain Biking Association