As a life-long roadie, I'm always amazed at how tired I am after riding my mountain bike on local trails.
For instance, my son and I headed down to the Towers of Power to ride the singletrack maze on the Puget Sound Energy transmission line right of way near Renton, Washington, a couple of weeks ago.
We must have bombed around for a good hour and were pretty wiped out when we stopped. I checked my odometer — 6.5 miles. On my road bike, I'd just be hitting my groove.
Scenery
As the trails wind around beneath power transmission towers, this isn't the most scenic location to bike. It's at the top of Renton Hill, so there are some pretty good views, but the trails themselves pass through overgrown thickets and small trees.
There are several levels of trails here.
A winding dirt track surrounds the whole maze. This is more than a mile long and is a good warm-up or skill builder.
Challenges
I was definitely challenged by the more technical trails, such as Mr. DNA and Parasite. We didn't even attempt Crop Circles or the 2.25-mile long Tapeworm.
Even with a map, I had difficulty following the trails because they're so twisty and users had taken shortcuts across the loops. We eventually gave up and found our way by trial and error, sometimes returning to start after taking a wrong turn.
There were very few cyclists down there for a sunny Saturday. We met a few on the trails and heard a couple of more whooping and hollering from the Tapeworm inside the wooded area.
We're looking forward to more trips down there. Parking is at the Phillip Arnold Park lot.
Here's a wiki for Towers of Power. I'd cycled past there before, but I located it on the Backcountry Bicycle Trails Club website.
Rockhopper
My September rides included a few road-trail rides on my vintage Rockhopper. I bought a set of tires with a tread design that's good for road and trail, which enabled me to explore some rail-trails on my rides.
The longest bike journey last month took me from my home in Bellevue to the Tolt Trail in Redmond, across the Snoqualmie Valley to Duvall, and then along the Snoqualmie Valley Trail to Snoqualmie Falls. From there I headed down to Fall City, up the Snoqualmie-Preston Trail then down the short Issaquah to High Point Trail and back home. After that 70 miles, I looked into the road/trail tires.
King County has an online map of all off-road bike trails. It's a .pdf document and takes a minute to download.
September stats
I'm still on track for my goal of 4,000 miles in 2008. My 251 miles for September is below what I needed for a 333 miles monthly average, but I banked some extra miles this summer so I'm still on track.
My bike log says 3,271 miles down and 729 to go.
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