Trail Ride Review: Cornish Town Forest Revisited

Well a handful of local mountains have already opened their gates to skiers and riders for the season, but that doesn’t mean it’s too late to get some last minute mountain biking in.

Today, we’ll be revisiting the trails in the Cornish Town Forest, taking a whole separate route entirely, which offers up some truly amazing terrain and with a new bike, YCN Anchor Kurt was ready to take on the best it had to offer.

The trailhead is still the same for this new route, which is slightly hidden off of Hilliard Road. The trail provides an initial uphill in the form of switchbacks and mantles plenty of rocks and roots. At the first junction, instead of going right, we’ll go left and be taken on a trail overlooking a swamp. Hitting two more intersections, we’ll stick to the right and follow the signs for the Lookout.

The trails are based around this lookout and naturally, are inclined meaning you’ll do have to do some serious climbing to hit the top. However, once you’re there, it’s quite a view, offering one of the best views of Mount Ascutney and nearby Windsor Vermont.

Now the downhill is the entirely new part of this episode, as instead of going right down the return trail, which we took up last time, we’ll be going straight. Essentially this trail rides across the top of a ridge, offering sections of downhill and uphill, before looping 180 degrees as you ride across the face of the ridge down to the bottom.

This single track trail has some really great sender portions where you can fly downhill. Once you hit the bottom, it’s a medium length uphill to ride back up to the parking area under the power lines.