Into the Flow

Lindsey Lee comes whipping full speed down Monkey Business, a mountain bike trail at Spirit Mountain in Duluth, her bike pinballing off rocks and berms. Under her full-face helmet and goggles, her eyes are wide, intense, and ready for anything—“enduro eyes,” she calls them, referring to the type of steep, fast downhill race that she’s competing in on this warm August evening. 
Time stands still as Lee, clad in armorlike gear, approaches a heart-stopping feature—a 30-foot “roll,” or drop, down a practically vertical rock face. Spectators at the base hold their collective breath as Lee reaches the point of no return. Like a canoe going over a waterfall, she shoots down the precipice, hops a gap in the rock at the bottom, and flies triumphantly past a cluster of race fans.

Lee competes here weekly all summer long in the Duluth Enduro Series, where she fearlessly hurtles down the steep terrain, her run timed by an ankle bracelet. Sometimes she ends up on the winners’ podium, where she flexes her biceps as a gesture of empowerment. Whether she places or not, she always gets a charge out of competing.

Lee, a child therapist, moved to Duluth five years ago in part for its easy access to the outdoors. Already an accomplished wilderness paddler, she tried mountain biking and took to it with a passion. Now completely caught up in biking for competition, wellness, and community, she rides often on the city’s nearly 100 miles of singletrack as well as the growing number of trails stretching up the North Shore of Lake Superior. When she’s not competing, she’s riding more socially on area trails with her husky, with her friends, or with the cyclists who join the inclusive group rides she leads for Duluth bike shop Continental Ski & Bike.

“The trails have definitely changed me,” Lee says. “I moved here for the outdoor culture, but I didn’t know just how they would become the backbone of my personal life.”

If North Shore mountain biking trails aren’t life-changing for every rider, they’ve certainly been weekend-changing for many, drawing bikers from Minnesota and beyond as the trails have increased in number, quality, and variety. Since 2019, more than 37 new miles of mountain bike trails have opened along the shore between Duluth and Grand Marais, and at least 15 miles have been rehabbed, with difficulties ranging, in the graphic lingo of bike trail signage, from easy green circles up to very difficult double black diamonds.

While the Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area on the Iron Range remains the marquee draw among Minnesota mountain biking destinations, the North Shore is growing its own reputation and set of fans from dabblers to advanced riders. These trails are the new kid on the block, despite being built on billion-year-old bedrock.

Trail-Hungry Riders. As a form of outdoor recreation, mountain biking has been on a roll for more than a decade, growing nearly every year since at least 2011 in the United States. In 2023, more than 9.2 million Americans rode a bike off the pavement. Like all forms of bicycling, mountain biking got a boost nationally during the COVID pandemic, when people avoiding indoor spaces flocked to outdoor activities. In some states, including Minnesota, it has picked up a steady new crop of young riders in recent years thanks to the many high schools that have adopted it as a club activity. And advances in mountain bike design—including bigger 29-inch wheels, beefier suspension systems, and electric assist for those who want it—have made the sport more accessible, and tougher terrain more rideable, to a wider range of riders.

All of this has led to demand for more trails, and it’s not surprising that some began looking to the North Shore, with its scenic vistas, rugged topography, and rock galore.
The mountain bike trails of the North Shore are clustered in four distinct areas, collectively offering a wide range of terrain and riding experiences. From north to south they are at Grand Marais, the Lutsen-Tofte area, Beaver Bay, and Duluth.

• In Grand Marais, the Pincushion Mountain Trails, which were built in the early 2010s and rehabbed in 2024, offer 10 miles of easy, intermediate, and advanced trails looping through the highlands above Lake Superior. 
• Between Lutsen and Tofte, High Climber—the highest mountain bike trail in the state—takes adventurous bikers on an intermediate trail through maple forests for five miles, to the Onion River Road, where it turns into Jackpot and continues south for nine more miles to the Britton Peak trail system in Tofte, a small network of easy and intermediate trails. Both High Climber and Jackpot opened in 2021 along with the revamped Britton Peak trails.
• Next is another North Shore newbie—Split Rock Wilds in Beaver Bay. Starting at the new Shipwreck Creek Campground in Split Rock Lighthouse State Park, the Wilds have a modest amount of easy and intermediate terrain in the lower reaches, but the higher ridgeline trails are tough and relentlessly rocky black diamonds, including four double black diamonds, and are considered by many to be the most demanding mountain bike riding in the state.
• Finally, there’s Duluth, where the North Shore begins, known internationally as a mountain biking mecca for its extensive variety of high-quality rides, including the Duluth Traverse, an easy/intermediate trail that runs nearly 40 miles through the city (see “The Spine of Duluth,” May–June 2018).

Lindsey Lee loves her local Duluth trails and rides them often, but she also has high praise for the new trails further up the shore. “Those trails are so masterfully built, so artfully made,” she says. “I try every summer to go ride Jackpot out and back. The scenery is incredible, and it’s so flowy that you just want to get lost in the trail. And then you have enough distance that you can stay in that flow state for quite a long time.”

Flowy to Rocky. Flow is a term that’s thrown around a lot at mountain biking trailheads, and it refers to a particular type of modern trail design and ride experience. Flow trails, as their name suggests, are purpose-built to feel smooth and flowy to the rider, who rises, dips, and turns on the terrain like a surfer on a wave. Flow trails are by nature more accessible to a broader span of riders than more steep or technical trails, and many new mountain bike trails in Minnesota and elsewhere are incorporating flow into their designs to appeal to the growing number of riders who are seeking it out.

On the Jackpot and High Climber trails, long flow sections with arcing berms are interspersed with rock gardens, a common trail feature on rocky landscapes, where the rider must pick their way through a corridor of stone. Some rock gardens are flatter like a flagstone path, while others will challenge riders’ balance and bike handling skills with a tricky jumble of rock. Though Jackpot and High Climber are intermediate trails, their rock features can test the limits of some riders’ skills or gear, especially if they don’t have bikes with shock-absorbing suspension.

“Some of the harder parts on the Tofte-Lutsen trails, with rock gardens and rock crossings, can be a little challenging without shocks,” says Jon Benson, assistant recreation program manager for the Superior National Forest, which manages the lands where all the new mountain bike trails between Tofte and Grand Marais are located. “Don’t be shy to get off your bike to walk over those little stretches.”

It will be well worth the effort, he suggests.

“A big draw of the High Climber and Jackpot trails is that they form one of the longest stretches of uninterrupted linear trail in the region, making a wilderness-like experience.”
In fact, some bikepackers on multiday tours through the forest are incorporating a one-way trip on High Climber and Jackpot into their routes, adding a bit of mountain biking to their gravel-oriented rides.

Certain thrill-seeking mountain bikers don’t see rock gardens as an interruption so much as an invitation, and they crave trails with gnarly geology. Those riders are finding what they’re looking for in the higher elevations of Split Rock Wilds, where soil is sparse and anorthosite bedrock and meticulously arranged boulders form extra-challenging trails.

“People are coming and saying, ‘Wow, this is really hard compared to Cuyuna,’” says David Cizmas, a Lake County recreation forester who oversaw construction of the Split Rock Wilds trails. Mountain biking at Split Rock does have “tip-over potential,” Cizmas says, “so throw on some knee pads.”

Bring on the Trails. The North Shore trail building boom has benefitted from a confluence of factors: rider demand, grassroots work from bike advocacy groups, a grab bag of funding, and lots of collaborations and partnerships between government units, from county to state to federal.

At Split Rock Wilds, Lake County and Split Rock Lighthouse State Park cooperated to connect the new county-run trails to the park’s Shipwreck Creek campground and to a parking lot and trailhead hosted on park property.

In Duluth, the nonprofit group Cyclists of Gitchee Gumee Shores, or COGGS, has been instrumental in creating and now maintaining the city’s vast trail network, and further up the shore, Lake County Mountain Bike Trails and Superior Cycling Association have played similarly integral roles, all powered by volunteers.

Officials at both Lake and Cook counties have fully embraced mountain biking as a tourism draw and have forged numerous partnerships to foster and promote trails in their area.
Much of the recent trail building has been paid for by state grants funded by lottery proceeds, such as the Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund, which Minnesota voters overwhelmingly renewed for another 25 years on election day 2024. Other funds have come from the Minnesota Legacy Amendment, which funds environmental projects with a portion of the state sales tax.

Cizmas at Lake County Forestry was able to begin construction of Split Rock Wilds by landing grants from the Greater Minnesota Parks and Trails Legacy Fund and the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board. Split Rock Wilds also got grants from the bike-oriented One Track Mind Foundation in 2022 and 2023 to build four more trails in the system, and it recently landed another, says Cizmas, to finish a “not difficult” 3-mile loop near the Shipwreck Creek campground. Construction is expected to begin this summer.

The runaway success of Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area, where mountain bike tourism has dramatically revitalized the moribund local economy, was a helpful predecessor when rounding up support and funding, says Cizmas, calling it “the Cuyuna effect.”

Kjersti Vick, marketing and public relations director for Visit Cook County and a mountain biker herself, says, “We’re seeing overall in Minnesota, and in the Midwest in general and nationally too, people are really getting into mountain biking.”

Both she and Benson point to the Superior National Forest’s huge network of gravel roads open to cycling, plus the paved Gitchi-Gami State Trail following the Lake Superior coastline in many spots (see “Bike the Gitchi-Gami State Trail,” July–August 2024), as other biking draws in the area.

Jeff Lynch, a co-owner of Sawtooth Outfitters in Tofte and a board member of the Superior Cycling Association, has seen an upward trend in his bicycle outfitting business thanks to the new trails. 
“A lot of people come up to ride point to point,” he says. “It’s definitely helped our rental business, and our shuttle business. We do a lot of mountain bike shuttles. We’ll shuttle someone to the other end of High Climber, and then they’ll ride back here.”

Low Impact. The North Shore mountain bike trails are in an ecologically rich area where many wild things roam and grow, including sensitive ecosystems and endangered and threatened species. On Forest Service land, before any shovels hit the dirt, a rigorous process ensured any new trails would avoid sensitive areas and minimize the impact on the landscape.

For example, to identify prospective routes for the High Climber and Jackpot trails, the Forest Service recreation staff worked closely with the Superior Cycling Association, first poring over maps, then scouting together on the ground, with an eye toward proper drainage and erosion prevention. The route then went through a thorough archaeological and environmental review by an interdisciplinary team before the Forest Service greenlighted the trail work.

A Grand Marais firm, Dirt Candy Designs, played a part in refreshing the Pincushion Mountain Trails and building Split Rock Wilds, Jackpot, and High Climber.

“We’re in a unique part of the state where we have a lot of great topography, interesting geology, and pockets of some of the best dirt around,” says Adam Harju, co-owner of Dirt Candy Designs with his wife, Mica Harju.

Adam, who says his mountain bike is his most important tool, rides the trails he’s built, getting direct feedback on what makes a good trail.

“My wife and I are both nature people,” he says. While modern trail design means moving some dirt and rock around, “We try to keep the footprint of the trails as light as possible, while still building a trail that’s going to stick around for a long time.”

A Whole Experience. Several years in from the big influx of new North Shore trails, people are making them part of their trips and memories.

On a sunny September Sunday, the five members of the Swenson family from Oklee, a small farm town over by the North Dakota border, have just finished riding on the Britton Peak and Jackpot trails and are packing up their bikes at the Britton Peak trailhead. Luke and Mary Swenson have been coming to the North Shore for more than 20 years, since before they were married and had kids, and “before they had the mountain biking,” says Luke.

“We usually come in the fall to mountain bike up here,” says Mary, “and it’s just beautiful every time.”

“There’s really, really pretty colors right now,” Luke adds.

On a different Sunday the same month, a group of six guys from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Arizona are sweaty and grinning as they pause between the High Climber and Jackpot trails at the Onion River Road. They often get together to ride and are currently at mile 18 of a big 27-mile out-and-back ride on High Climber and Jackpot, enthusing about the trail.

Dana Hendrikson, from the Twin Cities, calls it “top notch: the challenge, the way it’s built, the way you gain elevation, the way you go downhill.”

“It’s got little features like every minute,” says Dan Spengler of Minneapolis. “So you’re always looking forward to the next thing.”
“We were just talking about how good it is,” says David Katzmann of Madison, Wisconsin, “and how we can’t believe this many miles of trail can be maintained so well.”

The group has a routine: they bike, get burgers and ice cream, then hang out at the Duluth home of Rob Milburn, watching Buck Rogers on his streaming-free TV. “This is the happiest any of us are,” says Spengler.

For Lindsey Lee, the Duluth mountain biker, a trip up the North Shore to ride is always special and worth savoring: “The scenery, the breadth of the views that you can see from most North Shore trails is incredible,” she says. “I mean, anytime you can look out at infinity upon the lake, that’s just a magical part of it.

“When we go up north to bike, we pack snacks, and we always jump in the lake. We go to the restaurants up there. We make traditions out of seeing friends along the way, stopping at Palisade Head, picking berries—all those different kinds of things. It’s a whole experience.” 

For North Shore mountain bike trail information, maps, and conditions, go to:

• Duluth trails: Cyclists of Gitchee Gumee Shores, www.coggs.com
• Split Rock Wilds: www.trailforks.com/region/split-rock-wilds-42089/
• Tofte-Lutsen trails: Superior Cycling Association, superiorcycling.org/trail-conditions