French Creek, PA
by Bryan on June 27th, 2007
French Creek State Park is much larger than Marsh Creek. Our trail head was at the East Entrance past the Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. With over 7000 acres you would figure that would a lot of trails but most of them are actually closed off to mountain biking. We were limited to the trails in the northern section of the park which was just fine.
Our ride started out on Lenape Trail and headed East to connect with Boone Trail. Once again we were sheltered from the heat and sun by the wonderful green trees of PA. It reminded me a lot of the forests of Endor. In fact I am pretty sure I saw two Ewoks scamper off into the woods. I think maybe they were behind some bushes getting it on. Anyways, fast single track l love and this is a place to get your single track on. One thing you got to watch out for is to not catch your handle bars on the tress. The trail really winds through the trees and things get pretty tight.
Also as I learned from Marsh Creek, PA riding is all about roots and rocks. Not to many log jumps where we were, but lots of rock gardens – on the climbs! Once again its time to get in the saddle and power up through the rocks… if you even hesitate you are toast. I pretty much got about a third of the way up when my legs started fading and got my front tire wedged in some rocks. I had to walk a ways until I could find another spot to get some momentum. I was pretty much repeating that the whole way up. Definitely some good trails for training.
Meanwhile I hear someone coming up from behind and it ends up being some trail runners. They went jogging past and as we came up to a fork in the trail we found a table with a few people manning water and oranges.
Apparently there was some sort of trail running competition going on. They were pretty clear on telling us that we need to watch out for the runners. Unfortunately we didn’t have any other trail options… to the right was closed to mountain biking and we didn’t want to go back the way we came since runners were coming up that section so we decided to head with them and descend. Again with the “watch out for the runners�. Yeah we get it – they are kind of hard to miss considering there were about 20 that were trickling by in the 5 minutes we were checking out the map. I guess they thought we were just going to mow them down as we descended. Why would I do that, I sure don’t want to bloody up my Evomo jersey. Geeeze!
We had to follow some runners down a section of trail until they split off to another direction and then we were back up to speed.
One thing that’s interesting is the trails are marked with colored paint on the trees. I only saw one trail sign the whole ride – everything else was either yellow, blue or white. It was key to have the map so we knew which color we wanted to stay on. Plus since there are a lot of trails closed to mountain biking, we needed to make sure we didn’t stray.
Once again, we had a very fun ride. Next stop Marsh Creek, Part 2 – I will be exploring another section of the park with our local trail guide and Evomo sponsored athlete, Jake Davidson (aka: Mr. Single Speed).
June 27th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Looks like you had fun at FC. Look out tomorrow, I’m bringing my gears!