Rutland City

8/17/2025


Where can you ride in the city?  On busy roads, through housing developments, usually. But we were looking for gravel and those are not places that gravel riders prefer.  Rutland City does have a moutain biking park, however, so we decided to give that a go.

Pine Hill trails entrance – watch out for bears! – photo Marcia Gauvin

Pine Hill Park is a local gem for the residents of Rutland City. With 273 acres donated to the town over a hundred years ago, they have developed a beautiful recreational area with trails for dog walking, hiking, and especially mountain biking.

Big map and little maps available – photo Marcia Gauvin

At the entrance to the park, there is a large trail map. There is also a good stock of paper maps to take with you. It is a good idea that we got one, since we referred to it multiple times. It is a complicated network of back and forth trails, and we often had to figure out were we were.

Carriage Road – photo M. Gauvin

It looked like there was a two track gravel carriage road that went all the way to Rocky Pond, so we started out on that. That went OK, so we then tried to bike around the east and north side of Rocky Pond, near Muddy Pond.  Not possible today because it was closed for logging.

Rocky Pond – photo Marcia Gauvin
Gravel in Rutland City! photo Marcia Gauvin
Intersection of several single track trails – photo Marcia Gauvin

We headed out on some double and single track, up to the power lines, and found it was too rocky for our liking in some spots. We ended up crossing over the power lines several times on this ride.

This trail goes under the power lines – photo M. Gauvin

It certainly is a great mountain bike resource located right in the City of Rutland! 

Art Installation – photo Chris Leister

Note from Marcia: If you are new to single track mountain biking with terrain elements, you might want to give this ride a miss. Biking well on single track terrain is an acquired skill, and can be dangerous for those of us who are not very good at single track riding. I had to bale out at the end and return to the park on paved roads through local neighborhoods.