When Peter Strazzabosco moved to Chicago from Milwaukee in 1989 he did what any avid mountain-bike rider would do: set out to find the most tantalizing local off-road trails. He couldn’t get much information. Most of the mountain-bike owners he met seemed content to roll their knobby tires over asphalt.
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So Strazzabosco–a Lerner reporter who also writes biking columns for Windy City Sports–wrote, designed, and in August published the Chicago Mountain Bike Trails Guide, an 85-page book that details 31 riding areas in northeastern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, northern Indiana, and southwestern Michigan, and offers capsule reviews of 25 others. (It’s available at bike shops and bookstores for $10.95.)
The book isn’t the first on local mountain biking. “There are books available, but they aren’t geared toward what I believe active mountain bikers are interested in knowing about a trail,” he says. “They want to know how challenging an off-road trail is, not where they can stop with the family for a picnic. And there were no books that could direct a mountain biker to a place where he could push his bike to the extremes it was built for.”
