Magnolia and Cadillac are two of Tallahassee’s most popular trails. It’s not uncommon to encounter out-of-town riders on them, and they always seem to be at the top of the list when it comes to the most popular trails in town. Here’s the story of these two trails.
Magnolia was made for racing
According to Ken Foster and Mike McCue, Magnolia was Tallahassee’s first mountain bike trail. It was built by two guys who worked at Great Bicycle Shop, John Roberson and Derry Walsh, in the early 1980s. Foster said that Roberson was specifically the one who built the trail. Mike McCue said parts of it were built on an existing motocross trail. Roberson and Walsh built it to use as a racecourse and it stayed that way for a long time.
McCue said that “the first mountain bike race I rode at Tom Brown Park would have been an event promoted by the Great Bicycle Shop in 1988 or 1989. I remember this because I rode with a brand-new pair of recently invented clipless road pedals that I was eager to try. It had rained the night before, and my pedals jammed with mud. That was a big mistake, and I still remember Jim Greene looking at me with a ‘what were you thinking’ look on his face. At this time, the trail was shorter and simpler than it is now, but it was nevertheless an established network of sections well-known to mountain bike enthusiasts.”
According to McCue, the modern trail layout of Magnolia was nearly completed by 1994. David and Terri Berger of Gone Racing brought a stage of the Florida State Championship Series to Tallahassee. On the Friday before the race weekend, David and McCue walked the then-existing trails and defined a nearly 5-mile loop. They marked it with flagging ribbons because the official trail blazes had yet to be placed.
Between 1994 and 1997, Revolutions Cyclery and Kent Whittington promoted a few events at Tom Brown. The combined interest in Tom Brown resulted in the formalization of the Magnolia Trail. Numerous people volunteered many workday hours during this time.
The City made Magnolia an official city trail in the late 1990s, after Red Bug
In the late 1990s, after Redbug had been mapped out and designated as an official city trail, Chuck Goodheart approached Ken Foster and Mike McCue to have them map out and mark the trail so it too could be designated as an official city trail. McCue said that it took them several months to map it all out. Then, like Redbug, volunteers came in to mark it with blazes. JB Ritter and McCue came up with the name Magnolia for it. It did not have a name before then to Foster’s knowledge.
As McCue recalls, the arch for the Magnolia Trail, which still stands near the pump track, was installed on a whim. Ritter and McCue designed and fabricated the metal arch to make an official trailhead for it. At that time there were many access points to the trail, but no official trailhead. Burl Lashley, the father of Ace Lashley, another local mountain biker, worked for the city utilities. He helped acquire and install the surplus utility poles that support the metal arch.
When Leon County built the dispatch center on the land where part of the trail was, Chuck Goodheart, who worked for the City of Tallahassee Parks Department at the time, brokered a deal between the city, the county, and local riders. Goodheart was able to get $50,000 from both the city and the county for trails. He took that money and hired Trail Dynamics to re-do the Magnolia Trail in 2010-2011. Trail Dynamics returned to Tallahassee in 2017 to do more work on it, bringing it to its current form.
A member of Tallahassee’s “Bike Church” created the Cadillac Trail in the mid-1990s
Starting in the 1980s, there was a group of riders who met at Lafayette Heritage Park at 10am on Sunday mornings for “Bike Church.” According to Bill Otersen, “there were no trails back then, so we trespassed and were really good at it.” Their group rode through what is now Phipps Park, Lake Overstreet, the Miccosukee Greenway, Tom Brown Park, and Southwood.
Among the members of the Bike Church group was Larry Wolfe. Wolfe wanted to create a trail that would result in a big loop that ran from Lafayette Heritage Park out to the ruins of an old plantation off Mount Sinai Road. Using GPS. Wolfe mapped out the trail.
At the time, the land where the Cadillac Trail was built was part of the Dansby Farm. They gave Wolfe permission to build the trail, and with the help of a few others, Wolfe began building the trail in the winter of 1996. He and the others started cutting the trail from both ends. The trail they created was comprised of what is today West Caddy and Upper East Caddy, ending just behind the church on Mount Sinai Road.
As they were building the trail, Wolfe said they found the cars that are alongside what is now known as Cars Climb. The cars were Fords and Mercurys, but Wolfe thought that naming the trail the Ford Trail or the Mercury Trail wasn’t very impressive, so he called it the Cadillac Trail instead.
Later, after Wolfe built the trail, the Dansbys sold the property to the developer who created Piney-Z. As part of the deal, the developer gave the section of land where the Cadillac Trail was built to the city, and the city continued to allow riders to use it.
Today, these two trails offer riders the perfect mix of flow and tech
Magnolia and Cadillac are well known in Tallahassee and beyond. Not only do they host the first race of the Florida State Championship Series every fall, but they are home to signature technical trail features like the Gravity Well, Cars Climb and Nessie. Both trails have changed over the years, but they still offer riders the same fast, challenging ride that their creators intended.
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