Colorful oak, maple and poplar foliage crunched beneath the wheels of our bikes as my cycling buddy Jack Novick and I pedaled along a rolling trail outside Wausau, Wisconsin, on a recent balmy October day.
Then, on a patch of our route in the Nine Mile Forest Recreation Area where the wind had cleared away the dried leaves, we rolled over red granite formed more than 1.5 billion years ago that is now (in gravel form) drawing thousands of cyclists to this section of the Badger State.
Novick and I only sampled around 50 miles of this delightful gravel — which has crystals that fit together tightly, making it ideal for bike paths — in Nine Mile Forest and the 200-acre Erbach Park near Athens.
Had we wanted, we could have pedaled for days on what Tim White, executive director of Visit Wausau, says are more than 900 miles of interconnected, salmon-hued roads and trails that wind through hardwood forests and past rural dairy farms.
This “Granite Belt” sits on top of one of North America’s biggest deposits of red granite, White told us over breakfast at The Mint, which has been around since 1888 and is one of Wausau’s oldest cafes.
Backroads and trails covered with this ruddy stone spread out from Wausau (an attractive city of 40,000) into Marathon, Lincoln, Langlade and Shawano counties, offering everything from novice-friendly loops to challenging, 100-mile grinders.
White said points of interest along the routes highlight local history, agriculture and geology, giving riders more reasons to pause and visit small communities like Athens. That kind of cycling tourism may even help revive rural towns in the region, he added.
Central Wisconsin already hosts gravel events, including IRONBULL’s Red Granite Grinder, which will be held Oct. 9-10 in 2027.
On trips to Granite Peak Ski Resort in Rib Mountain State Park outside Wausau over the past two decades, I’d been curious why roads near Wausau have a crimson hue.
White, who grew up in Marathon County, said pinkish Precambrian rocks from local quarries have been crushed into gravel for more than a century.
Novick and I made the 150-mile drive from our homes in Madison to ride these trails, but White said the red granite trails’ growing fame is attracting cyclists from Chicago, the Twin Cities, St. Louis and beyond the Midwest.
For our first day, we started in the Doepke Recreation Area and looped around Rib Mountain, which rises to nearly 2,000 feet above sea level and soars 700 feet above the surrounding terrain.
That spin featured a couple of long climbs before we turned off to Nine Mile Forest, which has more than 30 miles of well-marked, multi-use trails.
Because it was a weekday, we encountered only a few hikers. But White said the region’s backroads and trails are seldom crowded.
That night, before bunking down at the Jefferson Street Inn in central Wausau, we dined at El Tequila Salsa, a Mexican restaurant near Rib Mountain.
Owner Rogelio Roman, who’s originally from Puebla, Mexico, told us he’s enthusiastic about a proposal for a mountain bike system in Rib Mountain State Park — which covers more than 1,500 acres — that would include both flow trails and singletrack trails.
On our second day, we drove out to Athens and biked along Black Creek on more red-granite and crunchy, leaf-covered trails.
We did numerous loops, getting lost on occasion.
But the highlight of that outing — in a scene that could have come straight out of “Little House on the Prairie” and the 1800s — was encountering a group of Mennonite elementary school kids who’d come to the park on a hay wagon.
While the girls — with their long braids and handmade dresses — were shy, the boys were curious about our bikes.
Finally, though we didn’t ride to this spot, we paid a visit to a marker denoting the exact center of the northern half of the Western Hemisphere at the intersection of 45 degrees North latitude and 90 degrees West longitude near Poniatowski.
Hey, who knew?
