Written by Sakeus Bankson
Photography by Chris Wellhausen
“The riding is great, and welcoming to all skill levels. I have a blast riding with my young, beginner-level daughters, and then riding more aggressive trails with my wife.” – Braydon Bringhurst
You don’t get to McCall by accident. There’s no “just passing through”; the 4,000-person town in central Idaho is surrounded on nearly all sides by remote mountains, including the largest roadless area in the lower 48, and it’s a 110-mile drive south to the nearest population center. Head north on State Highway 55 and it’ll be hours before you reach anywhere with more than 1,000 people … if the highway’s open, that is.
For most locals, however, that’s the whole point. Those that do make the effort will find themselves surrounded by three ski areas, two large lakes and endless hiking in the Salmon River Mountains. The valley also includes hundreds of miles of singletrack, which helped earn the town a Silver Level IMBA Ride Center designation in 2015.
So, in late August of 2024, I traveled to McCall, Idaho with professional cyclists Brooklyn Bell and Braydon Bringhurst, photographer Chris Wellhausen and videographer Zack Paukert to sample some of the area’s finest riding, from the backside of a luxury golf course to the new Brundage to Bear Basin trail. As the only Idaho native of the bunch, Braydon knows McCall well, and he and his family have made the two-hour drive from their home in Boise many times.
“I love the small mountain-fun-town feel, with wide open and expansive wilderness around,” he tells me when I ask him what draws them to McCall. “It feels like there are epic adventures all over the place.”
“Epic adventures” is a good way to describe the early days of mountain biking in the area, which started in the early 1990s when a handful of locals began using bikes to explore the surrounding backcountry trails. The trails had incredible potential; they were also remote, rarely used and seldom maintained, and no one wants to carry their bike over a bunch of downed trees. As Dave Bingaman, Valley County’s recreation planner and CIMBA project coordinator, put it: “If you were on your bike for 50 percent of the time, we considered it a really high-quality ride.”
So, in 1997, a few of those early bikers started the Central Idaho Mountain Bike Association (CIMBA) to help improve them. Two decades later, the valley is home to some 500 miles of singletrack, spread out across two bike parks, multiple local trail networks and the plethora of backcountry options. It’s an incredible amount of trail, but not a surprise: you get to McCall on purpose, and it’s the remarkably dense bike culture behind those trails that’s truly impressive.
“We’re not a bike scene; we’re a bike town,” says Yadi Spangenberg, a local mountain bike coach and owner of Wild Rockies Racing. “There’s a difference there. It’s not a big, popular destination; it’s just a lot of people who are really passionate about getting out in the mountains and onto the trails.”
Jug Mountain Ranch
At first glance, Jug Mountain Ranch does not look like a mountain bike hotspot. The most obvious feature of the 1,410-acre private residential community is the 18-hole championship golf course, and when we pulled into the parking lot the first morning of our trip the only other vehicles were empty golf carts.
But hidden in the ponderosa forest behind the upscale clubhouse are 20 miles of some of Idaho’s best singletrack, all free and open to the public, and for much of the week the Jug parking lot is the bustling center of the McCall bike community. The trailhead hosts races, clinics and team practices, and serves as an unofficial campground for visitors looking to park their camper vans. It’s also where we met Joe Weede, Jug Mountain’s outdoor recreation director, who rolled up a few minutes later in the ranch’s massive UNIMOG shuttle vehicle.
Joe and Mountain Bike Manager Heather Thiry (the two are also married) have spent over a decade shaping Jug Mountain’s modest 640-vertical feet into a truly impressive miniature bike park, one that – thanks to owner David Carey – is accessible via climbing an old fire road (or, for $30, by shuttle).
The network spans nearly all riding styles, from the cross-country Shoreline trail to North Shore wood features on Stitches. We decided to start with a blue flow trail called Berm & Ernie, before moving onto Double Shot, a delightful mix of features and rock tech that feels fresh despite being 15 years old. Brooklyn would deem it her favorite of the trip, though Exfoliator, Jug’s new double-black jump trail, earned an enthusiastic honorable mention. “The riding is super fun – fast and filled with lots of playful features. And some of the zones are just super picturesque.”
Eventually, the late August heat forced us to retreat to the clubhouse patio for burgers and icy beverages. Yet somehow the dirt remained surprisingly grippy, and we spent the afternoon ripping Double Shot and Exfoliator laps until we were tired, dusty and completely satisfied. When you have trail builders as talented as Joe and Heather, you can do a lot with 640 feet.
Stats:
-Miles: 20
-Trails: 15
-Vert: 640 feet
-Highlights: Double Shot / Exfoliator / Berm & Ernie
Tamarack Resort Bike Park
The next morning we swapped shuttle trucks for chairlifts and made the 45-minute drive south to Tamarack Resort, a relatively new operation perched above Lake Cascade on the west side of the valley. Tamarack first opened its bike park in 2016, and in the years since has earned a reputation for some of the most progressive trails in the region thanks to a dedicated team of builders. Leading those efforts is bike park manager Mitch Herlein, whom we met at the base area for a tour of the mountain.
We spent the morning following Mitch and trail supervisor Mason Kennedy down some of the park’s go-to blues and greens for a warm-up, before ducking onto some of the techier classics like Rock Star and Exit Stage Right. Conditions were loose – not unexpected given, it was late August in a bike park – but even the dust couldn’t hide how well-built the trails were.
“The valley has a well-rounded riding scene, and Tamarack’s niche is the downhill aspect,” Mitch told us on the chair. “That’s what we’re known for: if you want a long downhill with a good amount of variety, you want to ride rocks, you want to ride jumps, Tamarack is where you come.”
Nowhere was this mix more apparent than on my two favorite trails, Smokejumper and Hot Shot. The rugged and raw descent plunges through vicious rock gardens, down rooty gulleys and over steep granite slabs more akin to Squamish than southern Idaho, all while traversing stands of the resort’s namesake tree. It reminded me of home, except quite dustier and without the crowds.
The route proved to be the perfect warm up for our afternoon session on Shark Bait, the resort’s new black-diamond jump line. Proudly located under the chairlift, the trail opened in 2024 and has proven to be a quick favorite for many riders in the area—and a close second for Brooklyn, who continued hiking some of the lower features long after the lifts closed, until hunger finally drove us back into town for dinner.
Stats:
-Miles: 39
-Trails: 23 (downhill)
-Vert: 1,700 feet
-Highlights: Smokejumper to Hot Shot to Show-Low / Shark Bait
Brundage to Bear Basin
If any trail in McCall represents a nexus of progression, backcountry and community, it’s Brundage to Bear Basin. Dubbed “B2BB” for short, the 6.3-mile machine-built trail drops from the boundary of Brundage Mountain, winding its way down a ridgeline to the Bear Basin trail system some 1,700 feet below. And that’s just the short version; the full route starts at the summit of Brundage Mountain, which adds another 700 feet of descent through the granite boulder fields and alpine meadows of the Rock Garden and Lakeview Vista trails.
B2BB was an ambitious project, one that took 15 years to make a reality. The idea was first dreamed up in 2009 by Payette National Forest recreation staff, but it remained in limbo until CIMBA and the One Track Mind Foundation teamed up to design the trail in 2019. It took the support of over a half-dozen public and private entities – including JA and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, the Idaho Community Foundation, the Richard J. Sabala Foundation, the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation, the IMBA Dig-In Program and the City of McCall – but by 2022 the group had the approvals and funding they needed to begin construction.
That October, CIMBA volunteers and the Brundage Mountain trail crew joined two of the country’s premier trail building companies and finally put shovels to dirt.
“B2BB was the first new trail built on the Payette National Forest in a long time,” says Dave Bingaman, who also works as the regional project manager for One Track Mind. “And they didn’t have to put a dime into it. We raised the money 100 percent.”
The trail opened just a year later, a testament to the community’s commitment and the power of partnership. It’s also an incredible piece of singletrack.
B2BB takes its time getting down the mountain, squiggling down the wide-shouldered ridge at a grade that both lets you keep speed while also accommodating a wide range of skill levels. The upper half sticks to the meadows and aspen groves, with a few large man-made rock features to add some spice, before diving into the forest with high-speed gusto. The bottom half is all flow, beckoning you to go a little bit faster … and a little bit faster after that.
Eventually the trail hits Bear Basin, where you can either go right to the parking lot or turn left and climb to Upper and Lower Drain. We chose the latter; the Drains are both flow trails, an impressive series of berms and jumps carved into dark red dirt. They were so good that, even after covering 16 miles and 3,000 feet, we still spent an hour sessioning the showcase step up at the bottom.
Stats:
-Miles: 6.3
-Vert: 1,700 feet
From the summit of Brundage Mountain:
-Miles: 12
-Vert: 2,400
-Shuttle: Wednesdays – Sundays, with pickup at the West Face Parking Lot at 9:30 am, 12 pm and 3 pm.
-Cost: $20 per pickup or $40 for a pickup + lift ticket to the top of Brundage
Brundage Bike Park
We’d gotten a taste of Brundage’s summer offerings on B2BB lap the day before, but we didn’t see the bike park’s full potential until the next morning when we dropped into Hidden Valley.
The resort’s only double-black-diamond trail packs a gargantuan amount of riding into just under 1,000 vertical feet, starting with a chunky subalpine rock garden brimming with line options (Braydon even found an impromptu rock roll in the boulder field above the trail). After that hefty serving of tech, it dives into a swoopy gauntlet of meadows sprinkled with bulbous granite features – some seemingly natural, which adds a unique ungroomed freeride vibe – before finishing with a series of jumps and berms. It’s the type of trail that gets more interesting the more you ride it, and I found myself wishing I was on a downhill bike…and wearing body armor, after a day-ending crash sent me coasting back to the lodge.
As dreamy as McCall is in the summer, many locals would argue that the town’s best season is winter and that Brundage is the main reason why. The lodge has the simple hometown coziness of someplace that’s been well-used and well-loved, and even during the summer it has a low-key bustle about it: bikers loading the lift, runners huffing up one of the lower trails, or people doing yoga on the same grassy hillside where the resort hosts free concerts on Friday nights.
It may have been Thursday, but we got a full dive into “bike town McCall” when the area’s NICA team showed up for practice – all 80 of them, representing roughly 10 percent of the school’s total student population. The horde gathered on the grass and began doing stretches under the direction of Dean Cromwell, the team’s head coach, director and another key figure in the local bike community. He and his wife Amy run a non-profit that’s donated over 400 refurbished bikes and new helmets to kids around the valley – including fifth graders at nearby Donnelly Elementary, where Dean and the other coaches spend a few days each year putting on mountain-bike skills as part of the school’s PE curriculum.
After Braydon gave a speech to the kids on risk management, they headed out onto the trails and we headed to Frenchie’s for dinner, a quaint counter-service restaurant in a converted house just outside of downtown. The food is as high-quality as it is quick, and the roadside patio—and cocktails—only adds to the flavor.
“It’s a super tight-knit community,” Brooklyn said over one of Frenchie’s “po boy” sandwiches. “Everyone knows each other, and everyone seems to give back, either by helping coach or by digging and working on trails.”
Stats:
-Miles: 30+
-Trails: 16
-Vert: 1,800 feet
-Highlights: Hidden Valley / Rock Garden to Lakeview Vista to Growler
20-Mile Trail
Having started the trip with the community’s most frequented trail system, we decided it’d only be fitting to finish with a dose of its feral backcountry beginnings. The area has no shortage of options – Goose Creek, a 6-mile out-and-back behind Brundage, is Braydon’s favorite trail in the area — – but Dave and a few other locals suggested we try something a little more remote: 20-Mile Trail, a rugged point-to-point in the Salmon River Mountains east of town reminiscent of the “epic adventures” that defined early mountain biking in McCall.
So, the next morning we met Dave, Joe and Heather, loaded our bikes into Jug Mountain Ranch’s Pinzgauer 4×4 truck, and began the hour-long drive to Duck Creek Trailhead and the start of our ride.
The trail’s first two miles wound up deep, glacially carved valley with towering granite walls, taking us past the quiet waters of Duck Lake before finally topping out at Lick Creek Saddle. From there, it was all downhill – eight miles of it, a 1,500-foot descent through subalpine forest, wildflower-filled meadows and over crystal-clear streams, alternating between chunky ungroomed rocky and rooty sections and flowing buffed singletrack. It felt truly wild and remote – which made sense, considering the largest roadless area in the lower 48 is just a few ridges over.
The ride dumped us out on Warren Wagon Road, just 10 miles from the historic Burgdorf Hot Springs. The rustic resort’s four pools – one nearly Olympic-sized – are open year-round, though accessing them in the winter requires a snowmobile. They’ve been a tourist attraction since the 1860s, and I can assure you they’re just as relaxing for tired mountain bikers as they were for the ranchers and miners of 150 years ago.
Stats:
-Miles 10.3 miles
-Vert: 676 feet climb / 1,530 feet descent
-Other Backcountry Highlights: Goose Creek / Payette Rim
We’d ended the past two days at the Brundage base area, so it was also fitting that we spent the last night of our trip on the grass outside the lodge, listening to the final show of their summer concert series. The act was singer-songwriter Jeff Crosby, who crooned out country tunes as the crowd danced through the sunset and into the night.
Looking down at the lights of McCall, I kept thinking that after five days in the valley we had barely scratched the surface of what it had to offer. There was still wakesurfing on Payette Lake, hiking in the Salmon River Mountains, and floating the North Fork of the Payette River. And as for the trails we had yet to ride … well, you get to McCall on purpose, and when you do, just make sure to bring your bike.
