Riding your mountain bike along a single track trail with perfect technique requires a union of mind and body called a flow state. This is where see the trail ahead of you with it's twist, turns and obstacles and know how to adjust your hands, feet and body to flow smoothly along the trail. I will never achieve this state of mind on a mountain bike because I have neither the skills or experience to be one with the trail. However I do occasionally like the challenge of trying to do so.
Most of my mountain biking is along rail trails but a couple of times a year I will try something a little more difficult. The local parks around me have some single track trails of medium difficulty that are fun in small doses. When I got my first mountain bike it opened up some new possibilities of riding and I looked around the area for the most popular trails to ride. One of the most highly rated trails with in a day trip is White Clay Creek State Park. This park has over 30 miles of trails in the woods and suppose to be one of the best places to ride single track. I have always wanted to go there so this past Tuesday I took a day off with Bob to give it a try.
White Clay Creek is at the top of Delaware so it's an easy drive down 295 and cross the Delaware Memorial Bridge to get there. I had studied the map of all the trails before the trip and had a couple of routes mapped out to try. I tried to stay to the easier parts but it's hard to know the difficulty of the trails from the maps and videos that I looked at. The trails are mostly narrow packed dirt in the woods. There main obstacles are the tree roots. Because the trails are ridden a lot the trail and the roots are smoothed out a bit so it doesn't take a lot of skill to go over them. There were occasionally some bigger roots I had to jump over and I was able to get over most of them without a problem. Some just looked too big to me so I did occasionally stop to walk over a few.
The constant twist and turns of the trail as well as the changes in terrain requires you to stay very focused to stay on the trail. Its a tough workout but once I got into mountain bike mode I was enjoying the challenge.
White Clay Creek has some interesting features. One of these is a pump track which is a series of humps that if ridden properly requires no petaling. If you push or "pump" your bike at the right point in the hump you can generate momentum to get you over the next hump (kinda like pumping a swing).
Although I understood the concept it was harder to do in practice and I had to petal at a few spots in the track. Still it was fun riding the humps and speeding around the banked turns.
We ended up with just under 5 miles on our first loop around the White Clay Creek. After a bit of a rest we headed to another section along a creek. I felt more confident on the second loop and took some more risks. There were even a few points especially on the down hill sections where I actual go into a flow but it would only last a few moments before I had to concentrate on making a quick turn or figure out how to pop over a root.
This type of mountain bike riding is mentally exhausting. There are hundreds of little decisions you have to make as you negotiate the course. You are constantly leaning left, right, backward and forward to keep upright and on the course as well as feathering the brakes to get you around the tight curves. We didn't have any falls but I did scrape a few trees with the bike and my arm.
At the end of the second loop we had done close to another 5 miles and were done for the day more because we were mentally tired than physically exhausted. It was a good work out and a lot of fun. There were a couple of trails I wanted to try that had some man made obstacles like narrow logs and bridges but I didn't have the energy for another loop.
We probably saw about a quarter of White Clay Creek so I would like to come back again to explore some more the next time I'm looking to challenge my mountain biking skills.
