While Aaron and I hiked backcountry this last winter, he kept telling me, "You really need to visit Rossland BC, the biking is awesome." After Jarred and I decided not to go to Sun Valley, a Rossland trip was in the making. Of course Aaron had to come (even though he had not been on his bike since Feb) to show us the goods. And goods they were. Rossland is a small ski town about 2 hours north of Spokane. While the skiing looked good, the biking was even better. The first great part of the trip was that the camping was literally in town and we had showers. I'm not normally obsessed with showering but after sweating on the bike all day, there's nothing worse than getting into a stewey sleeping bag. Our first ride in Rossland was Whiskey. Not once as we climbed up to the ride did Aaron say,"This trail is tough, you better be ready for some seious downhill." This is what he really needed to say because as we took off down the trail, I realized two things: 1) I wasn't ready for some serious downhill and 2) Canadians are serious about their biking trails. In Washington, we ride trails made for hiking with biking as a second thought. There are some places with quality trails, but every trail in Canada seemed to be made with a biker in mind, good flow, nice turns and lots of rocks.
Our second day we rode the infamous Seven Summits trail (pictured above). The Canadians are also serious about hard rides. Most trails are rated, just like ski runs and I consider myself a decent biker, one who could ride a black diamond trail. I was humbled in Canada...like I said, they're serious about their hard trails. This was the hardest 20 miles I've ever biked. Seven Summits was hard but every corner packed some great riding and it helped that the last five miles was downhill. After three days in Rossland, we decided another trip was needed.
After leaving Rossland, we headed over to Winthrop. Winthrop is beautiful but after spending four days riding trails built for mountain bikers, we were a bit dissapointed in the trail quality as well as the map quality. This would be the start of our quest for a really good map.....of anywhere. After convincing Jarred that I didn't want to ride 5 miles of fire road to maybe get some good single track, we left Winthrop and headed down to Twisp. Here, we found the best alpine trail ever. Washington has pretty strict rules about bikers on high alpine trails. We all dream of poaching trails, or we just go to Idaho or Canada to ride alpine trails, so it was amazing to ride our bikes up to an alpine lake AND get six miles of screaming single track back down to our truck.
Somewhere between Milky Way and another trail. I don't know if we really knew where we were here. Great flowers.
The Milky Way trail....just minutes from downtown Rossland.
Rossland Rocks.
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