Review Date
August 24, 2006

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Aerobic Difficulty
 4 of 5

Technical Difficulty
 4 of 5

Ridden Trail:
Once a month

Reviewed by: bpressnall ,  Cross Country Rider

Summary:
I first rode this trail in the eighties, when it had countless trees down and major bushwacking. Since then all work done on this trail has been from hundreds of volunteer hours of work. The reason I bring this up is without the volunteers you wouldn't be riding this trail. And we ask very little in return: Please keep the rubber in the track and try not to slide. The upper sections of the trail have many open areas where one may be tempted to ride off trail and tear up the fragile vegetation and make unsightly tracks. You may be tempted to cut across some of those tight switchbacks. You will become a better rider if you try to stay on the track through some of these very technical spots. Ok nuff said, what's the frigging trail like! It's about 5.5 miles and 2700 vertical feet of mind blower singletrack. Top 8000', bottom 5300'. The entire trail is rideable and if you can ride it clean the whole way to the creek, you are the sh--! Before you get too cocky, wait till you get through some of the lower sections. Some folks might not like the roughness of the top section. If not you can take a road 4N27 to the midsection If you're not real knarly, there are a lot of nice cruisy, but narrow sections and you can walk the rockiest sections. One nice thing about this trail is that it is fairly narrow singletrack. Let's keep it that way!

Recommended Route:
The best place to park is probably the dirt area near the highway bridge in Strawberry or the end of Herring Creek Lane (not much space, don't block the gate) which is the road that goes right between the Strawberry Store and the Post Office. Either way, instead of riding up the highway as in the discription you can ride past above mentiooned gate and after a few minutes look to the left for a motorcycle or quad track climbing steeply up to the end of a dirt road. Follow this road to a junction, veer right and continue up and stay left at next junction. The road fades to singletrack for a short ways, then brings you to Herring Creek Road. Turn right. Pinecrest quadrangle 7.5 minute map shows all the rest of the roads, but not the trail, which starts at the end of road 5N31. Two spots to remember are at the first little pond you'll see a trail veering left to a view (300') The second is after you ride around the second small pond and climb for 30', turn right on unmarked trail that may be hard to see. This will lead past another large pond and down to the gate where you started.

Other recommended trails in the same area:
Eagle Peak 4X4, Hamil Canyon, Willow Meadow. Eagle Creek, Coffin Hollow, Rock Creek, Bell Meadow, Crandall- Deer Creek

Review Date
August 24, 2006

Overall Rating
 5 of 5

Aerobic Difficulty
 3 of 5

Technical Difficulty
 4 of 5

Ridden Trail:
Ridden Once

Reviewed by: jakesdad ,  Cross Country Rider

Summary:
This is an incredible 90% single track ride that can actually be extended by parking up at Bloomer Lake. To do that you just stay on the forest service road that you take off the main highway. Bloomer Lake is approximately 8 miles from the turnoff. The upper part of the ride is gradually downward trending along Herring Creek (which stays mostly on your left). The first part is very technical but all ridable with some practice. When you get to the reservoir, you exit out on to a fire road past a primitive campground on your left. From there, you can start following the directions in the trail description up to the top of Pinecrest Peak and then head on down an extremely sweet, technical descent. We missed the turn off to Strawberry and ended up riding down the Catfish Lake trail to Pinecrest Lake and hitting the "no-bike" Pinecrest Lake Trail. If that happens, you are forced into a .75 hike a bike past lots of people until you get to the very steep, often unridable trail down to Strawberry that starts right before you get to the dam. The top part of our "mistake" was some of the funnest riding on the trail but the bottom was a bummer. Overall, one of the funnest rides I've ever done. You definitely need a good map for this ride. The guy who runs the bike shop at Pinecrest Resort is a great person to talk to about this and other trails in the area. The one downside is the long (30 minutes each way) shuttle. If you're staying at Pinecrest or Strawberry and can get someone to drop you off at Bloomer Lake, this ride goes from incredible to stellar.

Recommended Route:
shuttle to Bloomer Lake. Use fire roads to connect to top of Pinecrest Peak. Follow directions in trail description down to Strawberry after that. Note: the trail head at Bloomer Lake is hard to find. Best way to find it is to look for the little "dead end" to your left at approx. 8 miles from when you turn off the highway. The trailhead is basically directly across the road.