Ramsey County bike and trail maps

Ramsey county has several bicycle and trail maps online, but they're poorly organized and hard to find. These links may not persist, but they are a start:

Ramsey County ALRC: Active Living Ramsey Communities

Ramsey County Bike facilities and Gaps map (PDF)

• Overview map (pdf)
• Map 1
• Map 2
• Map 3
• Map 4
• Map 5
• Map 6
• Map 7
• Map 8
• Map 9

They have some Google maps "rambletown tours -- not terribly useful, but nice to see ...

Now you can visit Ramsey County's Gateway, Bruce Vento, and Indian Mounds trails from your computer. These maps are created from a web application that automatically generates trail maps from pictures on a web album that have been geocoded.

Other sites list more maps

Pedestrian Trails Map (5 mb PDF file)

Hiking and Biking Trail Information (pdf)

Mountain Bike Trails & Rules Brochure (pdf)

Mountain Bike Trail Map

then there are regional trails

• Birch Lake

• Bruce Vento

• Highway 96

• Rice Creek North

• Rice Creek West

• Trout Brook

• Rice Creek Water Trail

Lastsly, there's a Hiking and Biking brochure.

Battle Creek Regional Park - East Trail

Battle Creek Regional Park East (Google Maps) is our current favorite MSP XC ski trail. It's two track classic only, with multiple possible loops and shortcuts. There's a nice set of easy and intermediate trails with varying terrain, mostly short rolling hills.

• Trail Map (pdf) - There's also a parking area at Upper Afton east of McKnight that doesn't appear on the map. The northeast loop is open area, not wooded.
• Two areas to park and enter trails
  • North of the trails on south side of Upper Afton Rd and east of McKnight road.
  • South of the trails, on north side of Lower Afton Rd and east of McKnight road. This is also the entrance to the Battle Creek dog park.
• Adelsman's Skinny Ski - Battle Creek Regional Park East: Details with trail report
• MORC Wiki: includes a overlaid satellite map - this is for the summer mountain biking

Alternate map:

MSP XC Ski Maps

I love Adelsman's Skinny Ski site. It's the gold standard for Nordic and XC ski trail information for Minnesota and Wisconsin, including the metro area.

It doesn't, however, give me a full Google Maps view of trails that are near our home.

So I've created a publicly editable map - Faughnan MSP Ski spots. As an experiment I've made it completely open; anyone can edit it.

I'm only adding trails we personally use. We're a family of classic skiers, including a skijoring dog, and we live in the 55105 zip. So that's what we feature.

As I fill it out I expect to create a blog entry here for each trail, and I'll link to the blog entry from the map. That gives me a place to add some personal annotations and, of course, to include a link to Skinny Ski.

Todd Murray's and MORC's mountain biking pages (older)

Mountain Bike Trails in Minneapolis-St. Paul is an older set of reviews by Todd Murray, who I know of from the Minnesota Inline Skate Club. It's not been revised for some time, but it mentions some trails very few people know of (such as the scattered trails around Minnehaha park).

MORC has the most current trail descriptions. IT looks like a Google Maps layer so I hope there's a way to add it to my Google maps,

Ramsey County (Saint Paul) Bike Trails map

Ramsey County Parks (includes Saint Paul, MN) page now includes a link to a Ramsey county bike trails map. Of course it's a poor cousin to the Hennepin/Minneapolis trail system.

There's also a cross-country trail map and locations page.

Mountain biking is only allowed in Battle Creek regional park. I think the easiest entrance to that system is from Winthrop Street, south of Upper Afton road and North of Lower Afton road. There are also two single track entrances on Point Douglas Road though they may be tricky to find.

MSP bicycle trails - now Google

Minneapolis St Paul bicycle maps: Google and More. Great news. Now we need a GeoWiki layer that notes which bicycle trails are good for inline skating.

MOCA Trails - Theodore Wirth park

Trailhead poster