Start with the honest summary, because it will save you loading the wrong bike. This is very good mountain-bike country and very good rail-trail country. It is poor road-riding country, at least immediately around the lake, and we would rather say so.
The one to come for — Jungle Habitat
Jungle Habitat
about 10 minWest Milford, NJ
Eight hundred acres that were a Warner Bros drive-through safari park until the late seventies, now part of Long Pond Ironworks State Park and administered by Ringwood. There is somewhere between nine and eleven miles of singletrack in there, built as a stacked-loop network to IMBA’s design guidance and maintained by JORBA volunteers, and it is still being extended. Beginner loops through to properly technical, all from one parking lot.
It is also home to the Stags Adaptive Mountain Biking Trail, built in 2022 — New Jersey’s first purpose-built adaptive mountain bike trail, running to about three-quarters of a mile at beginner and intermediate grade, and open to hikers as well.
If you have never ridden the place, start with the outer green loop to learn how the network stacks before you commit to anything with a rock garden in it. And check JORBA before you drive over after heavy rain; the volunteers who build these trails would rather you stayed off them wet.
The rest of the dirt
Ringwood State Park
about 20 minRingwood, NJ
Woods roads and singletrack across a big park, and easily combined with the Skylands gardens if you are riding with somebody who would rather walk. Less purpose-built than Jungle Habitat and more old-fashioned New Jersey rock.
Sterling Forest State Park
about 15 minTuxedo, NY
Mostly hiking ground, but the woods roads around Sterling Lake ride well and give you the best water views of anywhere on this list. Check the park’s own map for which trails take bikes — not all of them do. Some trails in the fire zone have been closed since the November 2024 Jennings Creek Fire and had not reopened at the last official notice — check the park’s alerts before you set out.
Rail trails, for a flat day or a family ride
Orange Heritage Trail
about 25 minMonroe to Goshen, NY
The best one within reach and the right answer with children: a ten-foot-wide paved former Erie Railroad line running roughly nineteen miles from Harriman toward Middletown, most of it now surfaced. Park at Monroe, Chester or Goshen and ride out and back for whatever distance suits.
Paulinskill Valley Trail
about 40 minSussex County, NJ
Twenty-seven miles of ballast, dirt and cinder through farm country — unpaved, so hybrid or gravel rather than road. It meets the twenty-one-mile Sussex Branch Trail at Warbasse Junction, and between them you can put together close to fifty continuous miles.
When the trails are shut, and when they should be
Two different things, and only one of them is posted. The posted one is hunting: parts of this ground are open for deer and turkey in their seasons, and a weekday morning in the autumn firearm weeks is not the day to be moving fast and quietly through the woods. Wear blaze orange, or ride somewhere else those weeks.
The unposted one is mud. Highlands singletrack is dirt over rock with almost no drainage engineering, and riding it soft is how a trail becomes a trench — the ruts you cut in April are still there in August. The rule the local clubs use is simple: if you are leaving a mark deeper than your tread, turn round. Give it a day or two after real rain and the whole of the spring thaw.
That is the argument for the rail trails being on this page at all. They are surfaced, they drain, and they are the right answer on the days the dirt is not.
E-bikes, and the state line
Worth checking before you load one, because the two states either side of this lake do not answer it the same way and neither answer is intuitive. Class and access rules on state land differ between New Jersey and New York and they have moved in recent years. The park you are riding sets it; that is a five-minute check that saves a wasted drive.
Road riding, honestly
Greenwood Lake Turnpike is not a road to ride. It is narrow, it carries real traffic, and there is effectively no shoulder in places. Neither is Union Valley Road at weekends.
The riding gets much better the moment you are north of the state line. The lanes around the Warwick valley and the black dirt farms beyond it are quiet, rolling and lovely, and the sensible move is to drive fifteen minutes and start from the village rather than to ride out from the house.
Where to leave the car, and what to bring
Jungle Habitat has its own lot off Airport Road and it fills on a fine Saturday; the ironworks lots are the fallback and add a road mile at each end. Ringwood and Sterling Forest both charge on summer weekends and both want cash.
Bring more than you would on a road ride. There is no shop at any of these trailheads, patchy signal in the valleys, and the nearest help is a drive rather than a walk. A tube, a plug kit, a chain link and enough water for an hour longer than you planned covers most of what goes wrong out here.
The walking trails, if you would rather leave the bike · Bears, ticks and water — the same rules on two wheels
Bikes, and getting one fixed
Town Cycle in West Milford is the nearest proper shop for parts, repairs and advice on the local trails, and worth ringing ahead about hire rather than assuming — availability varies by season.