Located in southwestern Florida, Picayune Strand State Forest is best known as the place in the 60s where gullible northerners bought 5 acres of choice Florida real estate only to find out it was mostly swampland. Roads were built and subdivisions created, but few people came. Lately, the paved roads have been removed in a massive restoration project to enhance the proper flow of water in the Everglades. So far, it’s been working with indigenous plants and birdlife returning to this vast acreage. This desolate stretch of the Everglades is where my brother and I went mountain biking in early December with our guide, Wes Wilkins, owner of Everglades Edge. We saw no other humans driving or biking as we headed out on dirt roads, surrounded by swamp waters. In their place were snapping turtles, tall wood storks, and alligators sunning on the banks of the streams. An avid biker, Wilkins also chairs the 50-mile Tour de Picayune, which takes place this year on February 4^th. Even if you have no desire to race and win the cherished Durrwalker Cup, you can still sign up at Tour de Picayune to bike 50 miles of dirt roads lost in time, while spotting a wide selection of birdlife. 

Now that Columbus Day has come and gone, along with much of the fall foliage traffic in Vermont, it’s time to hit my favorite mountain bike trails in New England. If you’ve read this blog from its inception (all two of you), then you know how much I cherish the Kingdom Trails. They’re even sweeter when the last maple leaves are clinging to the trees before the first snowfall. That would be right now! Spend the night at Burke Bike Barn, recommended to me by my Stowe hiking buddy, David Bradbury. Located on the White School Trail, just outside the village of East Burke, this timber frame barn first went up in the 1840s. Recently renovated, it now features two units, each with full kitchen. The larger unit has three bedrooms and sleeps 6 (starts at $150 a night), while the smaller unit has 2 bedrooms and sleeps 4 (starts at $120 a night).
 

Just thinking about the Kingdom Trails in autumn, whipping through the red and yellow leaves on the maples behind the Inn at Mountain View Farm, and I want to jump in my car immediately. This 150-mile circuit, linking former farming roads with slender singletracks, offers the best of Vermont riding. One moment, you’re banking narrow turns on Coronary Bypass, the next you’re zooming through the tall barren pines in Webs. In fact, it’s such a glorious network that you’ll want to keep biking even when your legs are cramping and your Camelbak runs dry. Check out the article I wrote last summer for The Boston Globe on biking the Kingdom Trails with my son, Jake.
 

Feel like mountain biking to the beach? At the 778-acre Bluff Point State Park in Groton, a dirt road lines Poquonock River as you head straight to Bluff Point Beach. If you want to ride by your lonesome, numerous singletracks spread out in every direction from the main trail like spokes on a wheel. Choose one and ramble along the shores or inland to the John Winthrop house, dating from the early 1700s. Take a breather on the rocky bluffs where you can see directly across the Long Island Sound to New York’s Fishers Island and left to Rhode Island’s Watch Hill.
 

Working these past 20 years primarily as an outdoors writer, it’s hard for me to admit that I’ve never been to Bend, Oregon, one of the renowned outdoor hubs in America and a mecca for serious mountain bikers. North, Middle, and South Sister Mountains rise 10,000 feet above town, forming part of the Cascade Range. Due north is Black Butte, one of the region's many cinder cones that create a volcanic landscape unparalleled in the U.S. outside of Hawaii. I plan to bike on the Butte Loops Trail as it circles Black Butte on old logging roads that have been closed to motorized vehicles and are now part of the roads-to-trails program. Then I’m heading to the eastern part of the state to hike in the Oregon desert with my travel writing buddy, Eric Lucas.
 

Last Memorial Day, I returned to a network of mountain biking trails I first wrote about in 1996 for Men’s Journal magazine. Back then, two or three avid fat wheelers were connecting farmland and cutting a web of trails through the woods of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The rolling countryside dotted with mountains, rivers, meadows, forest, and dilapidated barns is one of the most majestic sites in the Northeast, especially behind Darling Hill Road. So I wasn’t surprised to see cars from as far away as Connecticut and Ontario sampling the trails. And they were sweet, rolling up and down the hillside under the towering pines and atop ridges with vistas of the whole valley. What surprised me even more than the popularity of the mountain biking was how quickly my 13-year old son Jake took to the sport, grinding up and sweeping down the challenging terrain. He kicked my ass and I was happy to write about the experience for The Boston Globe.
 

Fat wheelers rave about the Kingdom Trails outside East Burke, Vermont.  There’s no denying this is one sweet chunk of bucolic riding, yet I’m going retro and picking the trails around Randolph, Vermont, home of the first New England Mountain Biking Festival, as one of my favorite fall rides. Park and/or stay at the Three Stallion Inn on the grounds of the historic 1300-acre Green Mountain Stock Farm, where more than 30 miles of singletracks and doubletracks weave through the woods. Also check out the 12-mile Mud Pond Loop, a quintessential Vermont ride past rows of yellow corn stalks yet to be reaped and farmland so fertile you feel like jumping off the bike and digging your hands into the rich soil. 

 

South Africa’s Nkomazi Game Reserve has just unveiled a new type of safari. Instead of planting your bum in the back of a bone-jarring jeep, which is the norm on safari, Nkomazi is offering a mountain biking safari. Not only will you be guaranteed the chance to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the Big Five, lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, and cape buffalo, but you'll be doing it in the wide open savannah with no place to hide. No worries. It’s only a morning ride and you’ll be joined by a rifle-toting ranger. Nkomazi is located in a malaria-free zone near Kruger National Park, about a 3-hour drive from Jo’Burg.
 

In 1997, I had an assignment from Men’s Journal magazine to preview a network of mountain biking trails being created in the northeast corner of Vermont. Biking with one of the route’s designers, I quickly saw the potential for an off-road biking route through this rural part of the state. On a spongy mat of trails dusted with pine needles, we cruised past century-old barns and small, dilapidated sugar shacks lost in the countryside. Yet, even though the scenery was pure Currier and Ives, the trails felt very raw, as evidenced by the mud bog we ended up in, sludge up to our knees. Today, I’m happy to report that the Kingdom Trails is the preeminent mountain biking route in the northeast, a 150-mile circuit of former farming roads and slender singletracks that climb and dip with the green countryside. If you want a great fall ride, this is it! Take, for example, Coronary Bypass, a gem of a singletrack run, where you bank corners and bounce over roots as the path snakes back and forth through a pocket of colorful maple trees.

See the story I wrote about biking the Kingdom Trails with my son for the first time, recently published in The Boston Globe.
 

This just in from my buddy Dave Williams in Thailand, owner of Thai Cycle and Paddle Asia. After two years in the making, they have now completed a 205-mile mountain  biking trek that crosses the Malay Peninsula. Starting just outside of Phuket, you can bike through jungle, rubber and palm plantations, and small villages from the Andaman Sea to the Gulf of Thailand. Leaving the masses behind in Phuket, you’ll get a chance to see the real Thailand on a 7 to 10-day trek. There’s also a shorter 5-day ride that gets you halfway across, zipping up and down numerous singletracks along the way. Cost starts at $825 per person, including food, guides, lodging, camping, and bikes.