December 24, 2019

Jenny and I were looking for a place to trail ride sort of between us and we decided to check out the Edinburg Gap area. It has a lot of ATV trails which are also open to horses. There are two parking areas, one with a big loop, tons of parking, and even a toilet.

Look at all those trails. Tons of them. We parked at the lot to the west (where the toilet sign is in the image above). The other lot (where the P is in the image above) it just a little further East along the road. It also has a lot of parking and room to turn around but if it’s a particularly busy day a trailer could have some difficulty.

There is a rather rocky trail that connects the two parking lots. There are also trails across the road. Lots of options.

Below is a quick clip of part of the parking area.

There are signs up near the entrance. They have maps up and lots of trail info.

There are also paper maps you can grab and take with you. Very handy.

Although the parking area was packed (especially when we got back) we only passed two groups of dirt bikes and both knew right of way. They stopped and shit off well in advance of us and have a polite “have a nice one” in exchange when we passed.

For this ride we decided to keep it to two hours and try the loop that goes in and out of the larger parking area. We rode out on trail 493 on the bottom of the parking area.

There is a concrete creek crossing pretty quick on which has signs warning equestrians about footing. There is also a creek crossing right next to it off the concrete. We went ahead and rode over the concrete and found it just fine.

This trail loop continued to be pretty rocky, nothing too out of the ordinary for this general area.

One thing that I love about this loop is it is covered in bridges. We must have crossed well over a dozen of them. Some were bare wood and some were packed in with dirt. Some were long and some were short. Luckily both Jenny’s horse King and my pony Simon don’t bat an eye at bridges. But if you have a horse that need some bridge work this would be a good place to get that work in.

And this trail network is also super well marked. Not only are colored trail marks clearly visible on trees (We followed the blue Vs) there are also maps posted at intersections with “you are here” stickers on them.

The loop was mostly a walking loop since it was pretty rocky, but we opted to add on the little lower loop you can see in the images at the top (south on 493, made a left onto 497 cross trail to 498 loop back to 497 cross trail and rode back north on 493 to the parking area popping out at the top of the parking area).

Look at King being cool.