Black Mountain ORV Northern MI

[BlackMountainEX]

If you are looking for a great ride in michigan, head up to Cheboygan for a few and check out Black Mountain. I just finished my usual 4 day stay there and it was awesome. It has about 75 mi of trails plus tons of short loops and a large scramble area with nice hillclimbs. The Bluffs Resort is located at the entrance to the trails and it a nice campground with a good bar and restraunt. Larry (campground owner) is great and never complained a bit about the 65 or so people at our 3 sites and the party that lasted from 4pm on to 8 am!!

[polaris bob]

We were up there last weekend. Nice place but boy oh boy is it ever dusty!!

The people at the bluffs are a first rate bunch of guys, they will bend over backward to help you out. Class act all the way! Two thumbs up all the way for them!

The scramble area is nice and all that but it gets boring real fast, how many times can you climb the same few hills before you get bored out of your mind? None of the hills are that steep or that hard to climb.

The trails are very poorly marked! I mean just terribly marked. It was hard trying to just find out where the trails started. And once you were on them, trying to figure out where you were in relation to the trail map was almost impossible.

The other thing we noticed was that the trails are way too narrow for anyone on a quad. These were supposed to be an ATV route, 50 inch's wide at a minimum for 6 feet up, but it seems that the local club that does the "grooming and cutting" of the trails are a bunch of die hard, hard core, dirt bikers that hate the quads ruining "their" trails! So they have been making them real tight so that the "quad guys" go somewhere else to ride and leave "their" trails alone!

It seems that other people have complained about this and as a result I heard from a few local guys we met up there that the club that has had the contract to do a whole bunch of trails across the area has had their contract pulled and they are being sued by the state for back charges for not keeping the trails up to spec.

Our tax dollars are being spent to pay these clubs to maintain these trails and they are taking OUR money and just pocketing it and not doing what they are being paid to do.

So I guess we will have to see what happens.

If you have anything coming close to a full width quad, I can not recommend that you take the time to visit this trail system until it has been "fixed"!

That is unless you like riding at 1 mph bouncing and slamming off every other tree and rock that is on the trail. If this is your idea of a good time then go for it!