A short list of mountain bike trails around MacGroveland and Highland neighborhoods

Made this up for the Highland-Mendota mountain bike team.

Site	Travel	Good for
Deer pen (Minnehaha park, NE corner and by creek)	bike	Climb skills, turns
Hidden Falls	bike	Short loop skills, hill climb
Crosby Farm (high trail)	bike	Short fun outing on way to Hidden Falls
Brickyard (fossil beds)	bike	Brutal hill climbs
Mendota (Minnesota River S)	bike	Basic trail ride speed skills
Minnehaha Dog Park/Upper	bike	Basic trail skills
Murphy	drive	Great terrain, good change
Theodore Wirth	drive	Great for staging race practice, passing skills
Battle Creek	bike/drive	Later season, all around skills, technical downhill
Lebanon	drive	Intermediate with advanced options
Carver	drive	early season skills, night ride, intro to mtn bike events
Elm Creek	drive	Twisty trails with quick climbs and fast hands
Terrace Oaks	drive	Short but very race like. Should do this more.
River bottom - Bloomington Ferry	drive	Fun creek crossing, basic riding
River bottom - 77 to 35	drive	Good fun terrain, some hill climbs, night ride
White tail, WI	drive (long)	Great climbs, terrain and scenery

Michigan's Maasto-Hiihto & Churning Rapids XC ski: ultimate dog-human nordic ski experience.

It doesn’t get better than Michigan’s Maasto-Hiihto & Churning Rapids XC ski trails.

My family spent a long weekend there recently. With our usual stops along the way it took us 8-9 hours (Google says 6h) to drive from St Paul Minnesota to our hotel, the Magnuson Hotel Copper Crown in Hancock Michigan. From the Hotel it was 5 minutes to the Chalet trailhead (red P lower left below, from map 2015, this excerpt is lower 1/3 of system).

 

We made the long drive partly because human CO2 emissions have warmed Minnesota enough to make snow cover unpredictable. At our scheduled 2016 holiday slot there was reliable snow cover at two locations near Lake Superior — Minnesota’s far north (arrowhead, Grand Marais) and Michigan’s famously snow Keweenaw peninsula.

Snow cover wasn’t the entire reason though. Minnesota is pretty nice too. The winning feature was that we could ski with our dog Kateva. The trail system is explicitly dog welcoming. We paid to be supporting members and we will be back.

Obviously, if you are taking your dog to Maasto Hiihto, you need to have a system to get any poop away from the trail. A baggy in a backpack works best.

Update 1/14/2017

• Nearby Michigan Tech Trails have several dog, walker, fat-bike friendly loops.

See also:

• Keweenaw Nordic Ski Club (KNSC): Main web site
• KNSC blog
• Trail Conditions - Twitter
• Maasto Hiihto / Churning Rapids Cross Country Ski Trails (Facebook)