Elroy Sparta Trail

The Elroy Sparta is the oldest rail trail in the country and it’s 33 miles long and it includes three long tunnels. We started the trail in Sparta which claims to be America’s Bicycling Capital and has a depot that houses the area’s Chamber of Commerce.

The trail is well maintained packed dirt and is heavily wooded on both sides so nice and shady. We rode from Sparta to the first tunnel which is 3,810 ft in length and very very dark. It’s also very, very wet.

Here’s Tom trying to get the selfie station to work. After a couple of tries we finally succeeded. Old people can’t do selfies!

Definitely needed to walk the bikes and Tom had to hold a flashlight as we screwed up on packing the headlights. We were both happy to finally hit the end!

So the trail is nice and shady but all that wooded area means that there is pretty much nothing to look at. There comes this point where you just get tired of pedalling. Maybe if the Elroy Sparta were not coming on the heels of 6 days of banging out the miles we would have been a tad more tolerant but around 12 miles we agreed that it was time to head back. And, yup, that meant a trip through the tunnel yet again! To be fair, there was this one stop with a water pump that actually worked. I filled a water bottle and drank it. Hope that was ok.

At the little park with the pump there was a replica of a tunnel-keeper’s shack.

Elroy Sparta, I think you are a really lovely trail but maybe it just wasn’t the right timing for me (Jeannie). I did appreciate the escape from the sun and Tom can now fill in the exciting news about the clouds!

There were actually quite a few stretches of the trail with no shade, and when we started out there were literally no clouds in the sky. About 2 or 3 miles into the ride a single cloud appeared. As the day progressed more and more clouds appeared. I think they were providing a little more shade and some color to improve on them fairly boring scenery.