Ride Report: Dry Lake Campground and Spring Creek Trail, Steamboat Springs, Colorado

Having never visited Steamboat Springs before, I wanted to camp close to town so I could get my finger on the pulse of Steamboat as much as possible. Really, there’s only one camping option within 20 miles of town: the Dry Lake Campground. For more information on Dry Lake, check out my campground profile on Tripleblaze.com.

While Dry Lake is a convenient 6-mile drive from town, if you have the legs for it, you can also ride to and from town on singletrack on the Spring Creek trail.

On Wednesday during my summer 2013 trip, I had to log a pretty full day of work, but Max and I decided to shuttle the Spring Creek trail down to town. Since I had just destroyed my rear hub on the Superfly the day before, we took turns shredding down on the Diamondback Sortie.

Up high, Spring Creek is a nice, narrow singletrack trail, but it’s quite gravelly, which makes railing the corners at speed pretty sketchy.

While I wanted to open it up and really rip, it’s really a good idea not to: this trail receives a lot of traffic, especially as you get closer to town. The hiker traffic can get very heavy, even mid-week. But if you want to ride to and from town and the campground, you can do that all on singletrack… pretty sweet!

Once at the campground, you don’t have to go far to find more trails: there was singletrack leading out the back of our campsite and into the mountains! We did some exploring in this area, but since none of these trails were marked, I know we didn’t nearly cover all of the terrain there is to ride here.

Overlooking the lush mountains above Steamboat. I was actually quite surprised at how green and verdant the terrain around Steamboat is! The vegetation is much more lush than many places in Colorado.

One named trail we explored was the Soda Creek trail and it started near our campground. Unfortunately we didn’t get to explore it in its entirety, as a thunderstorm rolled in on top of us.

A few of the other singletrack trails we explored turned out to be of questionable legality at the time, despite one of the bike shops in town recommending them. However, with the new trail developments in Steamboat planned to begin this year, these trails are set to be legalized soon.