First Ride In Jackson

Well it took a little while, had some things to take care of, but we finally hit dirt in Jackson about 2:30. It was a treat to actually be able to ride right from the RV park. I was a little skeptical about how good a ride was that you left right from town for but was pleasantly surprised with a great one. The loop involves another bike path return that basically takes you right by our RV park, thus the starting point. It was a couple miles along the edge of town out to Cache Creek drive then probably a half mile on a the dirt road before we picked up a trail along the creek. There’s a few in there so it took a little bit of route finding but soon we were headed up along the creek. It hardly felt like we were climbing but the GPS was slowly showing our progress up. This first trail, Hagan, crossed back over the creek and we were supposed to pick up another trail on the other side continuing up the drainage. I think we missed the higher trail and caught a lower one that just meant a little more road than trail heading up to the next trail head. 7 or 8 miles into the ride we hit the Game Creek trail head and crossed over Cache Creek on a nice bridge and started climbing in earnest for a bit. The trail moderated to a reasonable middle ring climb till we hit the crest between the two drainages. It was a fun ride down along Game Creek for the next couple miles.

What goes down must come up. At the intersection with West Game Creek trail, we took the right and started to climb again, still at a very reasonable middle ring rate occasionally having to drop down into the little ring for a couple minutes in steeper sections. Like many of the trails that follow creeks, once you get near the top things get steep and the trail climbs out of the drainage on a series of fairly steep switchbacks. We got to the top then headed down towards the next intersection and decision point.

Wilson trail headed left, had a couple black diamonds on the map, and would leave us with about a 4 mile paved railtrail ride back to town. The right would take us back over by the ski resort with what looked like long swoopy switchback trails back down near our camper. We chose left. It actually started out at a very easy fun grade down for a while and started to wonder about the most difficult black diamond sections. Soon enough we found them, it got steep and loose with a few small drops but all quite ridable. It was pretty obvious that this trail doesn’t get used quite as much as the others as the vegetation was a bit more grown in than what we had been riding, but not a problem.

As things leveled out we caught our first views of the Tetons and the valley we would take back to town.

Once a bit of single track above the highway ended, we caught the bike path which took us right back to within a half mile of the camper. Although it was about 4 miles, it was pretty much level and not near the pain that the ride back to Snowmass was a few days ago. The last mile or so was actually very pleasant running along the creek.