When I moved to Texas, I assumed I would be unable to continue with my mountain bike habit, due to Texas being a little short in the mountain department. Well, that erroneous assumption is my favorite of all my erroneous assumptions about Texas.I was about 2 months into my Texas exile when I was out in the East Texas zone. I drove into Tyler State Park. There was a sign pointing towards the mountain bike trails. How can this be, I wondered?
I had my bike with me, so I followed the signs to the trails. It was on those trails I was to learn that, though Texas may not be mountainous, Texas did have mountain bike trails that are quite strenuous.
After the Tyler trails had worn me out I was talking to a guy, telling him I was from Washington, recently moved to Fort Worth and not expecting to find mountain bike trails in Texas. That guy told me there were a lot of mountain bike trails right in the D/FW Metroplex.
That information totally surprised me. The biking guy told me to go to a bike shop where I could get the local trail info. I did so the next day. Soon I was biking all over the D/FW Metroplex.
The Dallas-Fort Worth zone has over 200 miles of maintained mountain bike trails on 23 different trails. Some of them are quite challenging, like the DORBA trails at Cedar Hills State Park. Or the Northshore trail on Lake Grapevine. Some are easy, but still fun, like the trails at River Legacy Park. There is one trail, that being Sansom Park in Fort Worth, that is so steep and scary looking that there is no way I'd bike it. It was hard enough to hike it.
Many of the local trails are made and maintained by DORBA (Dallas Off Road Bicycle Association).
In a little over a week there will be a new scary addition to the Dallas-Fort Worth area mountain bike trails. As in the soon to be retired Mountain Biker in Chief is moving to Dallas and is said to be looking forward to riding the trails. Bush started pedalling when his knees could not handle jogging anymore. Apparently George has gotten quite skilled at mountain biking.
I suspect I'll run into George W. some day on some trail some where. I shall resist the urge to throw a shoe at him.
2 comments:
I'm just returning to biking too. I was pleasantly surprised to find sansom park bike trail just down the road from my house. A few of my friends and I took the turn on a red trail out at sansom and it was a good thing we were going slow too. I would of hated to end up as a crumpled heap at the bottom of one of those ravines.
Yikes Anonymous, you are much braver than me. Those Sansom Park trails look scary. Like you say, you could suddenly find yourself flying down a cliff. It didn't look safe to me. More scary than anything I ever saw in Moab, and those are some scary trails, in places, in Moab.
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