12/5/2023 0 Comments Ride with gps brown county gravel![]() ![]() In fact, since we were there, trail builders have already returned to touch up a few spots that didn’t do so well during the spring rains. Only being open a week, the trails were definitely in their break-in period. All in all, we had a great ride! I won’t bore you with the details of every trail section because I’d rather encourage you to go to Bailey’s and experience it for yourself! We climbed, we ripped some downhills, we found some dodgy switchbacks that kept us on our toes. We ran into a couple of locals & chatted them up a bit. Like all first trips to a new trail, we stopped frequently at intersections to check our position on a map. (If only we could get Big Woods Pizza to open a shop in Chauncey, I’d be making fewer trips west.) In many ways, for those of you familiar with Brown County, that’s probably a good reference point for the Baileys Trail System and pretty high praise right out of the gate! The trails reminded me of the terrain, elevation & flow of Brown County. When comparing my GPS files, Baileys actually had MORE elevation per mile than Brown County. Just a few words about elevation… we started the week spending a few days at one of my favorite places to ride, Brown County, Indiana. You can climb pretty fast and it doesn’t feel like you’re gaining as much elevation as you do. This type of trail literally has uphill flow. ![]() Because it’s typically not a long, sustained climb, the dips in the trail giving you a few seconds of sustained effort followed by a few seconds of reprieve. The fun part about a ‘flowy’ trail is the downhills are sustained and you can’t help but smile but also the uphills seem more forgiving. Nobody in their right mind wants to move that much dirt by hand. Flow is best created on machined trails because you have to move a LOT of dirt to make it happen. When it comes to trails, flow is created when the trail takes a rider down-hill and then captures that speed to move them back up the grade in a roller-coaster type movement. The other thing about machined trails is the flow. You won’t slalom around trees barely clearing your bars: it’s a different style of riding and it is a blast. For those of us who consider Alum Creek home, these trails are luxuriously wide. Machine built tends to be wider, 3-5 feet, giving riders a more open corridor. Hand-built trail tends to be narrow, in most cases 1-2 feet wide. What does this mean? Well, it means people who build mountain bike trails for a living built it with mini-excavators, Bobcats & such but the implications for riders is that it’s a pretty sweet ride. The trails are professionally machine built. All the trails we rode were either green or blue, mostly blue. The trail maps use a familiar green-blue-red guide: green=beginner, blue=intermediate, red=advanced, black=uh oh. There are currently ~14 miles of trails open and I think beginner/intermediate is a fair description. ![]() Best described as a ‘stacked loop’, the trails closest to the parking lot are designated beginner friendly and progressively get more advanced the further you go. Lots of room on the gravel access road and the grassy area so find a spot & throw it in park.īaileys will eventually be a network of nearly 90 miles of trails. There were maybe a dozen or so vehicles there already with only a few defined parking spaces. The trailhead at Bailey’s is ~5 minutes off 33 making it really easy to get to. Future plans call for more facility development at the park including restrooms, running water, changing rooms, etc., but for now, there’s a covered picnic pavilion and some playground equipment and a fresh gravel path that leads you into the trail system. Turning left just past the park, crossing the tracks & taking an immediate left puts you at the trailhead. You’ll turn left at the gas station onto SR 13 (Converse Street) where after about half a mile, on the left, on the other side of the train tracks, you’ll see the Chauncey-Dover Community Park. For us driving from Delaware, Ohio, it’s about a 90 minute drive on a quiet Sunday morning. Just past the Wayne National Forest Park headquarters & visitor center on 33 South, there’s an exit for SR 682 which takes you into Chauncey. After years of planning, advocacy work, arm-wringing, fundraising & eventually building, the Bailey’s Trail System at Wayne National Forest is officially open for riding! I could do a whole post on the history of the project and what eventually brings this sort of idea to life but for now, I’d like to focus on first ride & overall impressions of the first phase of Baileys.Ĭhauncey, pronounced more like “Chancy”, is host to the main trailhead for the Baileys system. ![]()
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