Night on Moose Mountain

The closest Rocky Mountain to the city of Calgary (I can see it from my office window), Moose Mountain makes a great evening's MTB ride. You can ride it from Highway 66 if you have the time and energy (around 30 km and 1,000 m of climbing), taking advantage of the Moose Mountain Bike Trails Society's trail network, or you can drive to the top of the oil access road and cut the trip to a mere 15 km and 350 m height gain. We opted for the latter, and I was glad of it - we finished not far shy of darkness.

For this ride I was joined again by Ian Stewart, and the weather was perfect; after a hot day a light breeze was raking the mountain. The early trail sections are generally rolling, with good packed dirt, after an initial iffy 50 m downhill on loose cobbles and rock - 'Iffy' as in, 'If I fall off at this speed, will I break my leg?'.

The crux of the route is the xig-zags, which are a mixture of ridable stone and deep gravel, particularly on the hairpins. I pushed several times on this section, but the scenery was good enough to take my mind off it. We were overtaken by fell runners here, too. Those guys were so fast that we failed to catch them again on the downhill.


After the zig-zags, the false summit. This is a lovely open bit of ground and the point where the views to the west start to open up. Last night visibility was perfect and the mountainside deserted - for me this was what it's all about.


Eventually you have to ditch the bike and hike the last few hundred metres to the summit. The fire ranger there invited us to ride the path back down, but that looked like a sure route to blazing a new double-black diamond downhill course on the side of the mountain - we opted out. On the summit, it was hard to believe that 3 hours earlier I'd been at my desk looking across the foothills to this place.

After signing the visitors' book and a quick hike down, we bombed down the mountain in a third of the ascent time. The cobbles and gravel made for some tough riding, but what a fantastic place it was to ride!




Moose Mountain from gas trailhead. ~14.5 km. More pictures here.