Nine Mile Forest Cross-Country Skiing and Snowshoeing — Attraction in Town of Rib Mountain

My experience at Nine mile was great. I rode the fun, (mostly) intermediate level, single-track mountain bike trails. The trails that are marked black or "expert" are very challenging and should be respected. The rest are fun and reasonably flowy. If you've ridden a MTN bike in the past you'll enjoy them. Just stay off the expert stuff unless you have a good bike, experience, and a lot of water!

My choice of a hardtail bike was not the best on them! The black trails are miles of rock gardens that will likely make even the most seasoned riders swear a little. I highly recommend a full suspension bike on them if you, like me, are not familiar with the area. By the end of my ride, I'd had a flat and the bearings in my bottom bracket were shot. (The bearings were reaching their expected life anyway. But still...) I was wishing I had rear suspension and bigger lungs. That said, I don't regret it a bit and enjoyed being able to push myself. Due to the aforementioned lack of squish, my choice of line had to be laser focused. I went over the bars three times when my back tire hung up on a rock or root. Building enough momentum to clear that hazard was always tricky and pedal strokes were at a premium. Executing a bunny hop over them felt next to impossible in some spots. (Clipping in here would be a precarious choice IMO.)

All together, this is a great set of trails and worth a visit. I know...

Rode our horses there yesterday. It's a local park for us. The trails are easy and beautiful. However, they are poorly marked. We ended up lost and not even in the park forrest. Came out to a road way North of the park leaving us with no option but to ride a busy county road back to the park road. 6 miles later...very frustrating and unsafe. The park has way too many trail offshoots without markers. Way too easy to get lost. Marathon county seriously needs to improve this park trail system. Probably won't go back until it's improved. For that, it gets a lower...

This is a beautiful place to snowshoe, cross country ski or fat tire mountain bike. We went there to snowshoe and it was great with one problem, the snowshoe trails are poorly marked. We thought it just might be us but ended up talking to other folks snowshoeing and they shared the same frustration. One of the days we were there a gentleman got lost and had to be helped out of the woods by the staff. If they would mark the trails better this place would...