Description

The sheer fact that a park this gorgeous with mountain bike trails *this good* can be found in the heart of Pittsburgh boggles the mind! Just a few miles from the towering skyscrapers in downtown and the rusting industrial complex along the river, you'll find this gem of a park tucked into one of the city's neighborhoods.

With a river running through the bottom of the park and a substantial hill rising above it, Frick Park has all the makings of a rad little mountain bike trail system. And it delivers! This park is *packed* with trails, both singletrack and wide doubletrack gravel paths.

Stitching the trails together into the best combination can take a bit of practice, but you can cheat by following the route mapped here.

Even this recommended route may seem convoluted when you first look at the map, but once you actually go *ride* these trails, the logic quickly becomes evident. The vast majority of the singletrack trails at Frick Park are smooth, flowy XC trails that wind around the hillsides, ducking in and out of the hollows in the woods.

Occasionally the smooth dirt is punctuated by a wooden bridge, skinny, root web, or rock garden, but the technical challenges are relatively few and far between.

While most of the trails twist around the hillsides, there's one key exception to this rule: the Iron Gate flow trail, which runs from the highest point in the park to the lowest.

This true gravity-style flow trail does incorporate a few natural features into the trail tread, but the perfectly-sculpted berms and delightful air opportunities all lead to a rip-roaring downhill flow ride, right in the center of Pittsburgh! While perhaps not the single best mountain bike ride in Western PA, you could make a solid case for Iron Gate as the best one-mile stretch of mountain bike trail in the greater Pittsburgh area.

Iron Gate is an absolute gem of a rip and is definitely worth pedaling back up the hill multiple times so you can learn all the features by heart. Whether you stick to the flowy cross country trails at Frick, dive into the downhill flow trail, or simply choose to ride it all, this urban trail system sets a benchmark that most other cities will never be able to meet!