The Dark Divide, a highly coveted Roadless area and one of the most spectacular slices of forest you can possibly ride your mountain bike on.  Our meeting location is at the valley floor and where we will eventually ride back to.  To make the most of our day, we’ll hop in the shuttle truck and drive for 1 hour to the top of our first drop, near Summit Prarie.  We have a sort of ride and hike scenario, but it’s nature and it’s efficient, a quick 15-20 mins and we’ll have hit our intersection with Summit Prairie and well along our way.   Our first half of this ride is on the Summit Prarie Trail.  This is a sweet ridgeline that stair steps down from it’s high point and then eventually drops continuously for the last 2k of our descent.  We exit following a creek and eventually back to our Truck.

We’ll have the chance to fill our water and grab some lunch and snacks, we have a short 25 minute shuttle to the top of our final drop on the day and the same spot our first shuttle dropped us.  We have to repeat our 20 min little climb from the truck to our trail intersection, but this time we will head the opposite direction, up into the heart of the Dark Divide.  We’ll make our way past and old fire lookout and several meadows before we intersect our final descent on the day, down Dark Meadow Trail.  This last piece of Trail is well named for it’s Dark Meadows, Rich with black soil and interesting trail features and some rocky tech as we near the valley floor on our descent.  We’ll ford a little creek and then meander our way out as we make our way back to our vehicles and slap some fives for the fine day that it was!  We always ride Saturday and Sunday, make sure to check out what we’re doing both Saturday and Sunday on the dates you’d like to ride.  Booking both rides on the weekend is what we recommend, it takes a while to get into the Gifford Pinchot and camping a night or two with two of our ride days is an excellent weekend and make the drive that much more worth it.