Across the churning waters of the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium, New York City’s ultimate temple of sport, lies Highbridge Park. Here, on the tallest, steepest hills in Manhattan, a heavily forested slope above the river is home to a twisting network of purpose-built mountain bike trails.

Highbridge is gritty and emblematic of the working-class neighborhood surrounding it and, if you didn’t know about its trails, you’d be easily forgiven for missing them. First carved into the hillside in the early 2000s, Highbridge’s bike trails came to be after years of negotiations. Namely, its advocates were seeking an answer to mountain biking’s most classic question: “Why can’t we ride here?”

Despite years of challenges, these trails have proven resilient and now come to represent a respectable and honest effort at integrating singletrack riding into New York City’s dense urban landscape. In the decades since Highbridge’s trails were dug in, a flourishing mountain biking subculture has developed alongside the city’s myriad of other niche worlds—the generations-old Washington Park plein-air chess scene, explosive two-on-two handball matches at city parks, an infinite continuum of obscure music, art, and food.

I grew up in Manhattan and lived there until moving to Colorado for college. I never dreamt of returning home with a mountain bike in tow. Despite having now lived across much of the Mountain West, I still call myself a New Yorker at heart, even just for the fact that I still know where all the subway trains go and am not fazed by the gruff attitude many locals display. So, in late 2023, I returned home with the goal of exploring what had happened to the Big Apple’s mountain biking scene in the 12 years since I left.

Early in my riding career, I had become familiar with a few trail networks in and around the city, including upper Manhattan’s Highbridge Park, Westchester County’s Blue Mountain Preserve, and North Jersey’s Mountain Creek Bike Park, as well as riding whatever bits of unsanctioned singletrack I could find in between. Even so, there wasn’t much to talk about back then—just janky trails in ignored areas. But it was dirt, and it was close to home.

After hearing rumors of new zones close to where I grew up, my curiosity was piqued. I reached out to a few of the local mountain biking groups and quickly made friends with folks eager to show me around. That’s how I met Mike Vitti, the head of Concerned Long Island Mountain Bikers (CLIMB), the sister organization to the local International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) chapter, NYCMTB. He was instrumental in getting the Highbridge trails funded and built.