Having previously ridden and enjoyed the south end of the Buena Vista trail network I was curious about the north end.  The north end of their trails, officially known as the Whipple Trails, is accessed from River Park at the east end of Main Street in beautiful downtown BV.  

The town has built two pedestrian bridges across the Arkansas River leading from the park to the trails on the other side.  There’s plenty of parking, bathrooms and signs with maps of the trail network.  Judging from the number of cars in the lot on a random Tuesday in November, it seems like a really popular place.

The ride starts with a steep hike-a-bike climb up to the North Trail, which provides views of town and Mt. Columbia to the west.

I had mapped out a ride of around 16 miles that would take me in a loop utilizing most of the new-to-me Whipple Trails and a few of the trails I’d previously ridden around Midland hill.  In my previous ride, I described the Midland Hill trails as smooth, punctuated with technical rock features.  I would say the Whipple Trails have this equation flipped.  That is, they’re mostly rock, punctuated with short sections of smooth trail.  In other words, pretty dang technical.  Fun, but definitely a different style of riding from what I’m used to.  No “just riding along” here, you’re constantly wheelieing, lifting, hopping and shifting to negotiate over an unbelievable variety of rock features.  

It starts with this gem of a trail name. Broken Boyfriend?! I don’t think I like the sound of that!

As it turns out North Broken Boyfriend isn’t all that bad. In the BV classification parlance it’s a blue/black trail and if I had been familiar with it, I believe it was completely rideable. Not being familiar, I ended up bobbling several of the features, miss-shifting and generally fumbling my way down the trail. Fun but not exactly stylish riding. South Broken Boyfriend, on the other hand, is a black trail and there were some features on it that I don’t see how anyone rides, not without full body armor anyway. Definitely a few opportunities to become broken. I can’t speak to the boyfriend part.

The Camp Elevation trail is the connector trail between the Whipple Trails on the north and the Midland Hill Trails on the south. It’s a fun, flowy trail with moderate technical features that seemed easy after Broken Boyfriend. Lot’s of grippy, smooth rock.

Once in the Midland Hill area I was able to ride with the benefit of familiarity from my previous BV ride. Such fun trails.

To get back to town, I followed the historic Midland RR grade for a couple miles then dropped into the north end of the Camp Elevation trail.

Followed by the Bridge to Bridge trail, which takes you back to town.

Nice view of Buena Vista with Mt. Yale and Mt. Columbia in the background.

It was a fun but longish day. My 16-mile ride, a distance that should normally take less than two hours, ended up taking me over three. A testament to the technical difficulty of the trails as well as to my stopping to take pictures of all those technical difficulties. A completely different style of riding and an interesting change from the trails I’m used to here in Salida.