Faye’s Cutoff

Half-mile shortcut through the Faye’s zone

Faye’s Cutoff does what the name says: it lops a corner off the Faye’s zone in the Highland Area, letting you shorten a lap or rearrange it into a different loop. It’s about half a mile with 140 feet up and 90 down, so it works in either direction without much complaint. Recent trail work shows — the tread is fresh red dirt benched wide through the pines and oak brush, with rebuilt corners that carry real speed and the winter deadfall bucked out of the corridor. Nobody drives up here to ride the Cutoff by itself. It’s the kind of trail you learn after a season in the Highland network, when you start assembling laps instead of just following them.

Use it to skip a chunk of Faye’s Fury when daylight’s short, or to double back for a second hit of the section you liked. Fresh dirt stays soft for a season after work like this, so expect some looseness in dry spells until traffic packs it in. It links naturally with the climbing off Sallee Key and the rest of the upper-hub trails.

Recent work is all over it — freshly benched red-dirt sidehill, a battery chainsaw clearing big downed junipers, one fresh-cut log end carved with the crew’s “WT.” The tread is red sandstone clay through pinyon, juniper, and Gambel oak, chunky with embedded cobbles lower down, with a steep off-camber traverse that carries some downslope exposure. Early summer puts yellow mule’s-ears against a red sandstone slab in a green meadow, and dusk lights alpenglow on the ridgeline above the junipers.

More on this trail: View on MTB Project → (original description contributed by community members on MTB Project)