The Maah Daah Hey Trail -- NY Times -- September 14, 2016

In the September 13, 2016, edition of The New York Times: a feature article on one of the nation's most famous bike trails -- the Maah Daah Hey Trail that connects the south unit an the north unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, perhaps one of the most unique parks in the world. It probably remains one of the remotest, wildest national parks but still incredibly accessible in the United States.

Some quotes from the article:

• it had been my idea to cycle the Maah Daah Hey Trail, the longest and arguably most grueling single-track mountain biking route in the United States
• the trail — a doorstep to the lush, vertiginous, sunstruck vastness of the North Dakota Badlands, which Theodore Roosevelt called “a place of grim beauty”
• Something I didn’t know about mountain biking, at least on a trail this challenging: You cannot look up. Even for a second. To do so is to court ruin. Forget about the scenery, all that peripheral beauty gone by in a flash, the profound silence, the bliss of seclusion. Was that a bull elk up ahead or merely a juniper? Oh, how the rings of morning light smolder over that ridgeline ... Wake up! Dial it in, man! Head down! Eyes locked on the trail! Let your mind drift and you are toast
• Bridging the north and south sections of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the Maah Daah Hey is 144.7 miles all told
• From the very start, it was all up, up, up. With an elevation gain of 8,600 (sic) (see note below) sidewinding feet, it began to feel Dantean. Everywhere were wonderful reminders of our mortality: sheer 300-foot drops into saw-toothed river bottoms; eroding hillside ledges that slid away in our wake; Yugo-size cows with a knack for materializing around blind turns; and at road crossings, careening oil trucks
• The Maah Daah Hey was a long time in coming. Originally conceived as a horseback trail, it took the Forest Service a decade to stitch together the inaugural 96 miles in 1999 — a patchwork of federal, state and private lands — and in 2014 they finished a second section, called the Deuce, which tacked on 48.7 miles (there are more miles to come, pending federal financing)
• For mountain bikers, who caught wind of the trail early on and now make up the vast majority of its 15,000 annual users, the wait was worth it. The Maah Daah Hey ranks with the storied Slickrock Trail in Utah and the McKenzie River Trail in Oregon as among the country’s greatest single-tracks. It laps both by more than 100 miles

Note: the above were "cut and paste" from the article. A reader questioned the "elevation gain of 8,600 feet." See this link: http://www.experienceland.org/.

Grinding across 120 miles and over 8,000 feet of elevation gain on the fast, rugged gravel roads of the North Dakota Badlands. If you like riding on Badlands singletrack, you will love grinding Badlands gravel! All of the same gorgeous North Dakota scenery you see on the Maah Daah Hey trail, but with the freedom of wide, open, red scoria gravel roads.

The "Badlands Gravel Race" is at this link: http://www.experienceland.org/badlands-gravel-battle/. 

Hello Maah Daah, hello Fadda --

Hello Muddah Hello Faddah, Allan Sherman