Consider yourself warned: there are no b-lines on Connecticut's newest mountain bike trail — known as Satan's Ridge. "There were people lowering bikes off of the rollers with rope to, like, get around sections," said Luke Wayne, Head Honcho of the Local 202 group, which built the trail. "It's definitely the real deal. Like, there's bands of cliffs you literally can't go around. There's no b-line, because the cliff split in one spot and allowed us a point to exit."
This three-mile singletrack loop is filled with trail features inspired by a trip that Wayne and the Local 202 took to British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest. Many of these gnarly obstacles consist of wooden bridges connecting the ample array of rock slabs and boulders into a somewhat rideable trail. However, there are often cliff drops in between, with the largest mandatory drop coming in at about five feet tall (with the ability to send it deeper into the landing).
Wayne emphasized that Satan's Ridge isn't "slow tech." Instead, "it's big, big moves, you know — rollers, adjustments, large exposure kind of tech. [...] It's big tech. I call it 'chunder flow.' There's a lot of berms between, connecting the rollers and the drops and the bridges."
"It’s like 10-foot-high skinny to rock slab to giant rock roller to berm to huck," said Mick Ferraro, Director of Membership and Outreach for the New England Mountain Bike Association (NEMBA). "People go there [...] and say it’s the hardest riding that they’ve ever done."
