Looking for good places to ride your mountain bike near Yosemite? Although there are no single track mountain bike trails within the boundaries of the National Park, mountain bikers visiting Yosemite can find several great biking trails located just outside the park in the Stanislaus National Forest. Many of our rafting guests bring along their mountain bikes and extend their rafting vacation with a day of trail riding. Try two days of rafting on the Main Tuolumne or Class V Cherry Creek combined with 2 days of mountain biking in the local area for the perfect active Yosemite vacation.
Rafting and mountain biking are great at getting people off the beaten path and into more remote and less visited areas of the Yosemite region. The varied grades of the western slope of the Sierra provide excellent terrain for bike trails. Maps of the Stanislaus National Forest indicate forest service roads and old railroad grades left from the steam-logging era mark the area.
The California Highway 120 corridor between Park’s northwest Big Oak Flat entrance and the town of Groveland offers several excellent trail options including a Buck Meadows-Lumsden Road Route that has sections along the Main and Upper Tuolumne river where we conduct our white water rafting trips. You’ll also find a great mountain biking culture and community here. The Groveland Trail Heads are a local non-profit whose mission is to create, enhance and preserve great trail experiences for users while promoting local commerce and communities in and around Tuolumne County. They are currently working on documenting local mountain biking trails. You can find this map, and many more at REI’s MTBProject website. While you’re there you can also download their android or iphone app to get access to trails on your phone and GPX trail files to upload into your own GPS system. Don’t forget your helmet.
