Stewart State Forest: 10,000 acres of mountain bike paradise

The water looks chocolaty as it swirls down into the drain. I scrubbing my marble cake like legs free of their muddy contents, the orange bar of soap has turned a grotesque color, like one of those old bars sitting on a century old porcelain sink in some old gas station. My back is slightly aching, but in a good way, a way that lets me knows me road like mad tonight. Road until I was out of breath, my fingers hurt and blood trickled down my legs from all the thorny bushes, and that is a great feeling. Riding until you should be spitting blood and looking like a Navy Seal about to infiltrate a terrorist training camp under his camouflage, it was really just mud, but I have a great imagination, then of course pushing yourself and riding like mad until you get back to your car and all you want is to sit down with a nice frosty beer.

I ride fast on my mountain bike, but usually it takes me a little bit of hard breathing to get up to pace, say a long grueling climb and some rocky descents. However, yesterday was a different story. I started out the ride and I was off, feeling the weight and all around squishiness of my bike beneath me brought a big smile to my face, since my last time on a bike was spent riding swiftly along hard paved shoulders, the exact opposite of what I was doing at this moment. But something happened, my legs felt amazing and I was riding with heightened senses. Suddenly I was riding down things I hadn’t ridden before at speeds I would not have thought of, up and down hills over rocks and through mud pits I rode extremely fast and smooth.

I ended up following some pre-ordained race course route all around and figuring out new trails and loops as I rode around. I have ridden these trails for the past couple years and ever since I discovered them they keep getting better every time. They are of extreme diverseness and provide someone with all sorts of riding experiences. My favorite aspect of them is that they are fast, fast even if the rider is slow. There are no huge long uphills or white knuckle descents, but there a long fast and smooth trails with my favorite feature of all, BURMED TURNS. That’s right folks, burmed turns in a cross country paradise. I know that these are usually reserved for downhill courses and BMX tracks, but here ast the Stewart State Forest located in Orange County between Middletown and Newburgh contains some of the sweetest burmed turns. This phenomena happens due to the multitudes of dirt bikers that ride the trails creating them with their skids around the turns, then us mountain bikers come around and casually smoothen them out creating a great small hardly noticeable from the air turn, yet when you ride they provide an untold amount of speed.

So I rode like mad for a few hours in the slanting sunlight and slight breeze, the weather could not have been better, slightly cool at 65 degrees and clear. Armed with the knowledge that warm humid weather was destined to arrive at the end of the week I knew I had to ride some trails before the black flies and mosquitoes returned with the haze and humidity of summers wrath.