Active Triangle

On Sunday we had some time to head out on the bikes. We’ve been wanting to try out the Crabtree Creek Trail for a while, so that’s exactly what we did.

The trail is pretty great, although I do have a couple gripes that could be remedied fairly easily: The trail will abruptly end in a couple different places, and there isn’t any signage telling you where it picks up again. Once you’ve ridden it once, you’ll know the trail good enough for the next time, but I would imagine that this turns some people off from riding this trail.

There was one road crossing where the trail ended at an area where there was some construction happening. Not a big deal, because construction happens, and signs can’t be made. I get it.

At another road crossing we literally had no idea where to go. The trail ended at a crosswalk and nowhere obvious to find the trail again. Thankfully for Google Maps, I was able to pull up our location, switch the map to bicycle mode, and after a couple minutes I figured out that we had to ride a block down the road and cross the street to get back on the trail. A sign with a simple arrow would have been helpful.

The worst one though, was actually a part of the trail we’ve encountered before, from the other side. We were riding the Crabtree Creek trail up from the southern end, and when we got to Lassiter Mill Rd, the trail just ended at a crosswalk, again with no signage. We crossed the road and went about a block until we found what looked like a greenway adjacent to a parking lot. Cool, lets go. Cruise down a couple hundred yards, and dead end. Great. It was actually a pretty little area/park, so it wasn’t totally a loss, but we would have preferred to stay on the trail, ya know?

We rode back out to the road, and cruised on past the elementary school, and suddenly, the greenway started again, and then a few hundred yards later, it ended, again. Not knowing which direction to go, I decided we’d just ride up the road in the direction of Crabtree Creek, thinking we’d have to run into a trail access point before long.

As we were trucking along Hertford St I noticed what looked like a trail access point. Concrete slab, railing, etc. I slowed down preparing to hop my bike over the curb to get back on the trail. Thankfully I quickly noticed that this was a set of concrete steps leading down to an unpaved portion of the trail. My road bike and I would not have fared well on the concrete steps.

From here we could see the unpaved portion of the trail, so I knew we were getting close, but then the road turned away from the creek, and we were back to square one.

Back out to another road, a couple turns, and we were again just cruising side streets without any signage telling us where to get back on the trail. Finally, we came up on a trail access point on Allegheny St. and we were back on the Crabtree Creek Trail.

I can understand not being able to link every inch of the greenway all the way through town, and I’m okay with riding on the road (especially the beautifully paved roads through this neighborhood) but I would definitely appreciate just a few signs along the trail telling us where to go to stay on the trail.

With all the money spend on these beautiful trails, could the city not make a couple of signs? Am I asking too much?

Anyways, we then rode all the way up to the end of the Crabtree Creek trail, and turned around, rode all the way back down to the Poole Rd parking lot where we were parked. We were at about 34 miles at that point, and decided to cruise down onto the Walnut Creek trail for a couple miles to get to an even 40 miles. Our longest ride to date. It was fun, and I’m glad we did it, but Monday hurt…