The Great Mileage Project

We're busy creating an accurate, downloadable and printable map for the mountain bike trails at Brown County. Up until now, our mileage and distance estimates of the trails have been based on GPS readings, which aren't that accurate for determining the actual distance that your tires are rolling on the ground. The GPS doesn't account for the myriad of dips, twists, turns, and obstacles that a good old fashioned bike computer does. We needed accurate distances for the map. We used two bike computers that were each calibrated by measuring the wheel rollout in millimeters. We didn't use just a pre-programmed setting for a generic tire size. We then averaged our distances to get the most accurate reading (the computers usually measured the exact same but were sometimes different by one or two hundreths of a mile).

We set out yesterday to tackle the task of measuring every inch of mountain bike trail that is currently on the ground at Brown County. I'm going to list those mileages here in case anyone is interested in knowing. This is probably the last time that you'll see these on the web in this kind of detail, so copy and save them now if you want it. I thought that it might be useful for people that ride there frequently and want to record their mileages without goofing with a fussy bike computer. It might also be useful for event promoters that are planning a course.

Well, without further ado, here we go:

Pine Loop: 1.20

North Tower Connector Trail: 1.19

North Tower Loop Short Way Counter Clockwise to Intersection with Aynes Connector: .76

North Tower Loop Clockwise to North Tower Entrance: .59

North Tower Clockwise to Intersection with Aynes Connector: 2.88

Aynes/North Tower Connector Trail: .15

Aynes Counter Clockwise to HP Intersection: .54

Aynes Clockwise to Top of Aynes Climb: 1.22

Top of Aynes Climb to HP Intersection: 1.63

HP Intersection with Aynes to Hobbs Hollow "Clubhouse": .85

Clubhouse to Top of HP: 1.99

HP to Upper Schooner Road on Walnut: .77

Upper Schooner Road to Schooner East Entrance Intersection on Walnut: 1.18

Schooner East Entrance Intersection to Hoosier's Nest on Walnut: .24

Hoosier's Nest to Rally Camp Parking Lot on Limekiln: 2.52

Schooner East Entrance Intersection to Upper Schooner Road on Schooner: 3.07

Upper Schooner Road to Where the Trails Ends near HP (unfinished) on Schooner: .77

That's a total of 21.55 miles of amazing trail.

It took us a little over 5 hours to ride everything with some fairly leisurely stops for refueling and fussing with bike computers and video equipment.