For the last couple of years, it seems like everyone is talking about Santos. The trail system is just outside Ocala in central Florida, and has over 50 miles of trails crisscrossing the Cross Florida Greenway. I have been talking about going for a while now, and this December, well into week two of an awful bout of Covid, I bought an EVOC bike travel bag so I could fly with my mountain bike and booked a flight to Orlando for a solo weekend trip in January.

I picked up my rental car from the airport and headed out. If you, like me, have never been to Florida as an adult except that one really weird Art Basel experience for work that one time, I’m going to tell you that Florida has a lot of toll highways and not a lot of good ways to avoid them, so you should not be like me and say no to the stupid EZ-pass thing they try to sell you at the rental car counter. It’s expensive but it comes with unlimited tolls and you will actually need that much so just do it and don’t sit stressed in the middle of an off ramp traffic jam trying to figure out what the ticket price is for going through the automatic toll lane without a reader.

An image of the arch at the trailhead announcing Santos Trails

Other than the toll situation, Florida was really easy! Be prepared for big highways, flat lands, and lots of humidity. The drive from Orlando to Ocala took me by some true American architectural gems like The Villages, an enormous master-planned 55+ development with such amenities as a special golf cart bridge that goes over the turnpike. This area is the holy land of restrictive covenants so there are a lot of master-planned communities.

Ocala is also an American center for fancy horses, so once you get towards town there are a lot of huge horse farms and wide open spaces of the specific horse variety that I can’t really describe except to say I know it when I see it. Santos actually has tons of trails for horses as well as bikes, and is planned out well enough that horses, bikes, and hikers all have their own separate trails, so there is very little opportunity to yell at anyone about the right of way (except, I guess, the alligators, who can’t read and don’t care).

I’m just kidding—I didn’t see any gators, and though I’m assured that they theoretically could be there, Santos is so well ridden that you’re unlikely to see one.

Santos is one of those places that is set up well to be a mountain bike destination, with a lot of community support and infrastructure. Arriving at the main parking lot, I first came upon the Santos Bike Shop, where I could have rented a bike had I not brought my own, and they were happy to give me a map and tell me the lay of the land. At the shop, a man named Kickstand Bill overheard me asking and offered to show me around for the first few miles of my ride. He gave me his card. It said “Kickstand Bill.” Lovely human.

The parking lot has real bathrooms, one of those permanent tool setups, a little skills area, some picnic tables, and, possibly most impressively, public bike wash stations. The trails are well-marked (I believe Kickstand Bill told me he made the signs), even as I got out yonder 15 or so miles from the central bike park area.

Santos is actually a couple of trail systems strung together. The main part is a very densely packed, well-loved system of trails. From there, trails zigzag out along a 15-mile section of the paved Cross-Florida Greenway. In the main trail system, there is quite a lot of elevation change (not extended elevation change, but a lot of steep, quick ups and downs), and technical rocky terrain in addition to the sand. There were not a ton of sections I found completely unrideable on my cross-country bike, but plenty I found challenging and one or two rock gardens that I chose to walk. There are also plenty of man-made obstacles to keep things interesting. Part of the trail system is a designated bike park, with sections of dirt jumps, some big drops, and places to have fun on a big travel bike.

The rest of the system is a mix of green and blue trails with very little elevation change (it’s Batso, but warmer in January). When I did a big 35 mile ride to the end and back I found some sections to be pedal-y and monotonous, but overall there was a really good mix of terrain. From one side of the system to the other the landscape changes about five times, and I found it to be a really great place to get in several hours of endurance miles on the mountain bike without ever riding the same trail twice.

The full Santos system, screenshot from MTB Project.

I do think any trip to Santos is going to involve spending most of your time at the main trail system, which had so many fun trails I easily could have stayed another couple of days riding them over and over. There was way more rock than I expected in Florida, and excellent use of seemingly every root in Central Florida.

On Sunday, I was somewhat worried about riding because it had rained hard from Saturday afternoon all the way through the next morning. However, when I pulled up to the parking lot it was full, and when I hopped on the trails I saw why. Santos is so swampy that the soil is actually firmer after a good rain. Riding in the dry erodes the trails more than riding in the wet, because after a good rain the soil is firmer. The roots are a different story, and it was fun to practice a lot of slipping and sliding around wet roots for those times that racing goes on even though it is raining. (I was glad I had so much practice last weekend after I signed up for Mayhem Mountain and it rained on the day of the event—just kidding I stayed at home.)

All in all, Santos was a wonderful solo weekend getaway, and I would do it again next January in a heartbeat.