Your Urban Wilderness weekend — trail report checked this morning
Baker Creek Bike Park is riding well, the Preserve needs a day to dry, and the club that builds it all just hired its first full-time trail crew. Plus: where the beer is when you roll out of the woods.
Seven issues in, it's time we gave the woods themselves the front page. The Urban Wilderness — roughly sixty miles of trail strung through South Knoxville's back yard — is having a good week, and we checked the conditions board the morning this published so you don't ride into a mudhole.
- Go ride
- Baker Creek Bike Park · Marie Myers (Year Round Get Down)
- Muddy
- Baker Creek Preserve — give it a dry day
- Heads up
- Campground Connector at Marie Myers partially closed
- Afterwards
- Trailhead Beer Market, 1317 Island Home Ave
- Fri Jul 31
- Andrew Broschart live at Trailhead
- In the river
- Open-water swim · Thu 6 PM · Suttree Landing Park
The trail report
The report, per the Appalachian Mountain Bike Club: Baker Creek Bike Park is riding well, and Marie Myers Park's Year Round Get Down trails are open — with one caveat, a temporary partial closure of the Campground Connector, though every trail on that side is still reachable. Baker Creek Preserve is the one to skip until it dries; riding muddy trail is how good berms die, and somebody hand-built every one of them.
The people who build it
About that somebody: the club just hired its first full-time trail crew member, which means the singletrack you ride free of charge now has a professional looking after it — and registration is open for the fall Trail Blazers program, which puts third-through-fifth graders on bikes in these same woods.
After the ride
And when you do roll out of the trees, dusty and pleased with yourself, the neighborhood has thought of that too. Trailhead Beer Market sits at 1317 Island Home Ave — self-described as the beer market in the back yard of the Urban Wilderness — and there are worse ways to end a ride than a cold one on that porch while the legs stop humming. They generally open at three on weekdays and one on weekends; their Facebook is the source of truth, or ring 865-409-4058. And this Friday the porch comes with a soundtrack — Andrew Broschart plays Trailhead on the 31st, per the market's own feed. If you'd rather be in the water than on the dirt, the open-water swimmers meet Thursday at six at Suttree Landing Park for their weekly river swim. Sixty miles of trail, a river, and a front porch at the end of it. That's the whole pitch for living here.
