Our goal was to ride all the dirt roads in Westchester County that could be connected without too much pavement in between (>90% of the total). We wanted this to be a gravel ride after all! We almost succeeded in our mission, but apparently we missed the northernmost loop. I was wondering why we came up about 4 miles short. I guess we’ll need to try it again in the spring season! Overall, It was a lovely ride on a day that seemed too warm to possibly be in late October. Thanks for joining us on this silly mission!
Here’s the full route:
https://ridewithgps.com/routes/44840039
50-mile route that overlaps the big route. A number of people opted to ride this shorter distance version: https://ridewithgps.com/routes/44845156
Steve’s Strava Activity (we missed the northern loop!): https://www.strava.com/activities/10121167782
A bit of background:
- We did an “All the Dirt Roads in Westchester” ride in 2021. We probably covered ~95% of the reasonably connectable dirt roads in the county in about 100 miles and 10,000 ft climbing. It was a crazy, spaghetti-like route!
- This updated route condenses the footprint of the ride to make it more dirt-heavy (>50% gravel) at the expense of losing a few dirt road segments. You should still expect a bit of routing insanity! (loops, out-and-backs, etc). Caveats: Short dead end streets, isolated road sections, and some small pieces of longer roads were skipped to make the route a little less crazy and to keep the proportion of dirt very high.
Skipped dirt road segments include:
- Boway/Woodway and Boutonville/Dingee roads: Requires a pretty big pavement-heavy loop for minimal increase in dirt road coverage.
- Black Spring/Black Brook: Tiny segments of dirt that add too much pavement.
- Millertown Rd: Only a tiny segment is still dirt, since half of it has been paved.
- Byram Lake/Oregon Rd: Too isolated. Requires too much paved riding to get there and back.
- Various small pieces of longer dirt roads: In other words, you’ll visit most of a given dirt road on this route, but might skip a small segment to make the route connect more readily with other dirt roads.
Riders on the “medium” version of the route leaving the Market at Union Hall.
The pond in Mountain Lakes Park, which was just before our biggest (and most technical) climb of the day. The park road is in much worse shape than it was earlier in the season, so use caution on the way up! And I strongly advise against riding down it on a rigid gravel bike. You’ll easily get too much speed for the rocky conditions and the potentially slippery leaves covering the road/trail.
