Seeing Red on the Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Trails

It took the pandemic for our youngest kid to finally agree to the removal of her training wheels. The fever dream of those earliest days of stay-at-home broke what had been her maddeningly stout insistence that there would never be a day she pedaled with any fewer than four wheels on the blacktop. So when she told me in April that she wanted to knock the trainers off and go for a roll, I couldn’t get my wrench fast enough. And on the first try she rode—for like 13 feet, before an almost imperceptible weedy seam in the pavement jumped up and tossed her head over handlebars onto the ground. She tried again, and again, and again. Eventually she got it, and she hasn’t stopped pedaling since. 

Still, when our family friends asked us to meet them in Crosby for a weekend of single-track riding on the Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Trails barely a month later, I was skeptical. Cuyuna is the upper Midwest’s mountain biking North Star. With 30-plus miles (and growing) of pristine red dirt trails undulating up and down around a series of otherworldly mine pit lakes and a charming-small-town jump-off point, Cuyuna and Crosby are quickly becoming to pedaling what the Boundary Waters and Ely are to paddling. Could Matilda—still shaky on the paved paths of Minneapolis—and her older sister, Willa—a solid rider with a new mountain bike that’s  seen nothing but pavement—really ride the red dirt rodeo?