Darlene and I loaded up the camper van with the cats and our bikes for a three-night stay in Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest last week. I’ve been to Boggs numerous times for mountain biking with the Outdoor Adventure Club, but we hadn’t been back since before the catastrophic Valley Fire that hit the area in September of 2015. While some 80% of the trees burned, a few scattered oases of old trees are still standing – most notably the trees surrounding the Calso campground as pictured above – and they’ve planted apparently 700,000 tree seedlings since the fire. These now vary in height across the area from two to five meters or more, depending on when they were planted.
Volunteers from Friends of Boggs Mountain have managed to rebuild the trail network over the intervening years and I was able to ride all of them but Jethro’s and Game Trail during our mid-week stay. With the loss of most of the old tall trees, all the trails are more exposed to the sun but they’re fun and well built even though they of course don’t exactly follow the original routes after the fire salvage and replanting efforts. Amusingly, they’re often quite a bit more windy now, zig-zagging between all the young new trees. One oddball trail is the Creek Trail, as the creek’s ravine was apparently not salvaged after the fire and remains strewn and clogged with fallen trees, rocks and shrubs around and over which the trail now weaves.
So yes, Boggs Mountain is definitely open for fun riding again and the campground luckily still provides much needed shade in the summer. That leaves the question as to when we’ll back again… Richard?!
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