Mtb trails near a downtown core
My question is: what small US cities (or bigger towns) offer the opportunity to live downtown and close to good mtb trails at the same time?
I moved to Boise years ago, when I was looking to be in a place that offered:
1) a little bit of a city center (Boise MSA had a population around 700k at the time, which is big enough for me) 2) mtb access next to that city center. Boise has some decent trails (and an abundance of boring trails) that start less than 2 miles from downtown 3) affordability in the houses that are between my #1 and #2
So, I got what I wanted. I bike 5 minutes to work every day and if I don’t take a lunch mtb ride, I can easily bike to trails from my house before or after work. I can complain about the lack of effort being spent on adding good trails that are close to me, and I can complain about overcrowding on the few exciting trails close to my house, but I can’t complain about housing because I’m on the lucky side of that one (bought my house in 2014).
Here’s the rub: I have a daughter. And Idaho politics has made this state a bad place to be for women’s health. This is a mtb thread—not a politics thread—but I’ll just say that the turn of politics here from generally centrist to whatever you want to call it today is causing me to want to move somewhere friendlier to human rights. I don’t care about chatting through the politics issue here—there are plenty of other threads for that.
But it is the reason why I’m asking this community: where else in the US do people get to live near downtown and mtb trails at the same time?