Rides | Clifford Park

Clifford Park is one of those hidden mountain biking jewels, tucked away in one of the neighborhoods of one of Maine's classic mill towns, Biddeford. The actual acreage isn't much, but the trails make good use of limited space, and are tighly packed into the geography and geology. Clifford is what you'd call a classic New England rock garden. The site was once a quarry, evidenced by the worked granite throughout. What's left is some sweet singletrack that climbs, drops, and traverses across the bedrock granite that is the dominate feature of the park. Key skills through much of the trails include being able to loft your tire to handle small ridges and bedrock shelfs, the ability to dodge your bike through rock-populated track at a good speed to float over the stones and confidence to hit quick (sometimes steep) downhills without braking into an endo. Roots weren't a huge issue - if you haven't picked up on this yet, when you think Clifford, think ROCKS.

That said, there are some well-built, well-established but very hairy sections of trail, including drops, bridges, ramps, etc. One drop, in particular, is called "smack this." It's a steep downhill that's complicated by roots. For that reason, riders should take a low-key run to familiarize themselves with terrain, surprises, etc., before hitting the trails at fullspeed - do an assessment of your skill level and abilities and then hit the trails.

We rode a loop set up for the annual Clifford Park race, about a 4+ mile run. The highly technical terrain led to some bottlenecks, so leave some space between riders to maintain flow and mojomentum. On the topic of flow - there were also some nice sections of singletrack that were mostly rockfree, and we really seemed to fly after picking our way through rock gardens. - Matt W.

How to get there.

Official trailmap.