A long time ago, before the Steese Highway came along, folks would travel from Fairbanks to Circle using a trail that went from Clearly Summit to Central that was called, surprisingly enough, the Fairbanks Circle trail. I had heard various stories about the trail, and and it had been on my list of things to checkout for several years now. I had been told that two locals, possibly the legendary “hell” bikers Roman Dial and Jon Underwood, had biked it from 12 mile summit to clearly summit, which is somewhere around 50 miles, and rumor has it took them over 24 hours. So, with a day free I decided to go check it out and see what it was like. I had hopes it might have potential for some off road bike touring, but either way I was interested in checking it out and crossing it off the list of trails I had been meaning to explore.
The area I explored was a mix of ATV trail double track..
and old mining roads.
The views were pretty nice though.
In some places there were several options, all seemingly heading in the same general direction. For the most part they seemed to join up again, and occasionally I bumped into mile markers marking the “official” trail.
On some of the ridges just before I turned around there were survey stakes that looked like they were marking a trail of some sort.
Though the trail was pretty marginal in this section for biking at least. I ended up walking down one of the hills as the trail dropped off very sharply and I couldn’t see a section of it. It turned out to not be too big of a deal, but walking is not the end of the world (just my dignity).
The next climb was pretty steep though..
So I took a trail leading off to the side, and was soon back on mining roads again. I pressed on a bit further, then turned around.
It definitely seems like there is some nice bike powered exploring to be done here, and now I really want to bike the entire route. This is definitely on the short list for next year.
