If you want to ride a bicycle down a manicured, perfectly graded, berm-to-berm dirt sidewalk while listening to a podcast, you should probably go to Colorado. Or Utah. Or somewhere with a robust tax base and a dedicated municipal grooming machine.
If, however, you want to haul a thirty-pound piece of aluminum up a three-thousand-foot wall of scree, get chased by something large and furry, and then plummet back to earth on a ribbon of singletrack that was originally cut by elk, you have come to the right place. Welcome to Montana.
Mountain biking in the Treasure State is an exercise in humility. It is a big, bruising, unapologetic landscape, and the trails reflect the topography. We have flow trails, sure. We have lift-served bike parks where you can wear body armor and pretend you are in a mountain dew commercial. But the true soul of Montana riding is found in the backcountry, on trails that demand payment in sweat and lactic acid before they hand over the gravity.
The sheer scale of what is available here defies easy categorization. When people talk about mountain biking in Montana, they usually point to the established, named trail systems. They talk about the seventy-five miles of interconnected dirt in Helena's South Hills, or the brutal limestone ascents of the Bridger Range outside Bozeman. They talk about the dark, loamy descents in Missoula and the polished, user-friendly loops of the Whitefish Trail. Those systems are spectacular, and they are fully documented in the destination guides that follow.
But if you stop there, you are missing the biggest secret in North American cycling.
Montana contains nearly seventeen million acres of National Forest land, spread across seven distinct forests. Within those boundaries lies an official inventory of 31,831 miles of Forest Service roads.
The magic number, however, is 9,784. That is the exact mileage of what the Forest Service calls Maintenance Level 1 roads. These are roads that have been placed in storage. They are officially closed to motorized vehicles. The gates are locked, the culverts are often pulled, and the two-track is slowly being reclaimed by grass and lodgepole pine. But they are not Wilderness areas, which means they are entirely, legally open to mountain bicycles.
Add in the 13,688 miles of high-clearance, deeply rutted Maintenance Level 2 roads where you might see one pickup truck a week, and you have over 23,000 miles of rideable, remote, utterly deserted backcountry dirt.
This is the shadow network of Montana mountain biking. It is a sprawling web of ghost roads cut by loggers and miners decades ago, threading through the Cabinet Mountains, the Pioneer Range, the Little Belts, and the deep timber of the Kootenai National Forest. You will not find these routes on Trailforks. You will not find trailhead kiosks or directional signage. You will find grizzly tracks, profound silence, and the kind of unbroken, fifty-mile endurance riding that simply does not exist in more populated states.
The riding season here is frustratingly brief. The high alpine routes are locked in snow until July, and by October, you are rolling the dice against the first major blizzard of the winter. But in that narrow, glorious window, the dirt is perfect, the air is thin, and the volume of available riding is staggering.
What follows is a comprehensive catalog of the suffering and joy available to you in Montana. We have mapped the state's major trail systems, the secondary riding hubs, and the gateways to the massive Forest Service road network. We have tracked down the coordinates, the difficulty ratings, and the seasonal windows.
It is all here. Pick a trailhead, check your brakes, and remember to pack bear spray. It is a very long walk out.
Exploring the Dirt
The destination articles mapped below cover major trail systems, bike parks, backcountry corridors, and long-distance routes. Open any stop for access details, then load the full set on the Backroads planner map.
- Billings: Rimrocks and Zimmerman Trails
- Helena: South Hills Trail System
- Whitefish Trail and Whitefish Mountain Resort
- Missoula: Rattlesnake, Pattee Canyon, and Blue Mountain
- Bozeman: Bridger Range and Gallatin Range
- Big Sky Resort
- Copper City Trail System (Three Forks/Butte Area)
- Kalispell and Bigfork: Beardance and Herron Park
- West Yellowstone and Lionhead
- Hamilton and the Bitterroot Valley
- Red Lodge: Line Creek Plateau
- Lewistown: Big Snowy Mountains
- Philipsburg: Discovery Bike Park
- Dillon: Beaverhead Trails
- Livingston and Paradise Valley
- Great Falls: The River's Edge and South Shore
- The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route (GDMBR)
- Route of the Hiawatha
- The Kootenai National Forest and the Deep Northwest
- The Rocky Mountain Front
- The Pioneer Mountains and the Big Hole Valley
- The Little Belt and Castle Mountains
- The Anaconda-Pintler Approaches