The six of us rode out of the parking lot, turning right on to NY 301 West to the campgrounds. We follow the campground road past the check-in booth, up the hill bearing right past the maintenance building to the left. Past the bathrooms on the right, we passed a water tower on our right. We approached a fork in the road and bore to the left where we saw signs that say "EMERGENCY ROAD-DO NOT BLOCK NO MOTOR VEHICLES," We continued past the horse trail parking area, on the right. The trail head began on a nice clean dirt road. At the farthest and highest (900 feet) point of the trail you can turn around and skip the part of the trail that puts you at Wiccopee Road. I'll go over the trail in greater detail as the story unfolds.
We started up the path, which was easy and flat. To be honest, for the first mile or so we thought that we must have made a wrong turn or something, because the trail was so smooth. That soon all changed. The trail got rockier and started to climb. At the top we took the downhill to a T, we took the left turn. FYI, the right side dumps you out of the park. The trail turns flat for a bit and we reach another split in the trail and again we turned left. Another nice little downhill and the trail climbed and got rockier for awhile. At this point my friend Aaron got his derailleur caught on a rock. After what seemed liked 15 minutes of bending, or what we like to call reforming, the derailleur hanger was close to straight and we could continue.
We came down a twisting downhill that put us out at Pudding Street. We crossed the street and bore left. As we climbed this now soft-packed trail we could see the parkway below us, to our left. Soon after this we had couple of long fast downhills with equally long uphills. Just as we were all looking for a break, our friend John's chain broke. Thanks to Aaron for bringing his chain breaker with him. We were able to fix it and continue. From this point for every long downhill that we had, we had a long uphill, and it seemed like the rocks were the size of boulders. We were almost at the turnaround point when another person in our group broke their cleat. We did a McGyver repair and continued. We took a rest at the turn around point and headed back the way we came without incident. The total mileage was 13.5.
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