US Mountain Bike Trail Stats: The West and States with Mountains Rule

We had a lot of fun with the mountain bike ownership analysis a couple weeks ago and now it’s time to delve into some trail stats. Ever wonder which US states have the most miles of mountain bike trails? Or which states have the lowest trail use densities? We did–and here are our findings.

The first chart above shows raw trail mileages for each state. At the high end, Colorado has 5,138 miles of bike trails while tiny Delaware has just 106 miles. I say “plus” because there’s no way every MTB-legal trail in the US is in the singletracks database but we can use it as a good approximation, especially when comparing states. Obviously California and Colorado stand out but there are a couple other interesting trends to note.

• States west of the Mississippi seem to have more trail mileage than those on the east side. Of course there are plenty of explanations for this: western states are larger (an area-normalized chart confirms this) and western states are also not as densely developed as eastern ones.

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