The other side of Dean Stone, in Miller creek, is where most of the new access has opened up. The map and overview provided by Five Valleys unfortunately doesn't give a complete picture of the roads and routes and property ownership on that side of the project, however, the inez trail, route from there to the top of deer creek, and the route down into little park creek are on trailforks, along with some other roads in the Miller creek area. Taking it a step further, I went and overlaid some land ownership squares into caltopo, which conveniently also has a public land overlay. So you can see what is TNC/5vlt, what is state, what is forest service
https://caltopo.com/m/42T5#
If it's blank/white, it's probably private property. In the top right you can change the base map and use the slider to turn on satellite imagery. Dashed lines do not exist and are just trail ideas I have.
Right now, on the miller side, there is very little actual trail, but that will change in the next couple of years. The inez trail is only a short section that connects to road. The miller divide trail does exist but has not been cleared in a couple of years as far as I know, and when I was up there last year we came across a good number of down trees. I'm hoping that this project will get that one a little more attention. Reclaiming/extending it to it's northern end as shown on forest service maps would be great. When it's clear, it's a pretty cool ride
What that leaves is all the dirt road riding. Holloman saddle, from Miller creek to Clinton, is the classic ride, and Albert creek from turah into deer creek/pattee canyon is the other. But now there are two more routes connecting Miller creek to the top of Deer creek- the Inez trail/roads mentioned plus Little Park creek.
Possibly the reason the 5vlt maps are a little vague is that all of this involves a good amount of climbing. Riding from town, going up Miller creek, going up inez, and then descending pattee canyon will be about 30 miles with 2500ft of climbing. Getting to the top of Little Park creek is a little more and doing a loop to the top and back down is more like 40mi and 3500ft.
So far, I have only climbed the inez route, and descended little park, and I'm fairly happy with doing them that way but there's no real reason not to do them in the other direction. The upper part of little park might be a bit of a hassle and require some pushing if you went up.
How do you do these rides? My first suggestion would be installing the trailforks app. This allows you to see the roads on the map and where you are on them. You can also download the gpx tracks from there or my caltopo map above. I'm not going to go into extreme detail on the directions- look at a map and figure it out. But I will provide the warning that there are A LOT of old logging roads up there, which generally go nowhere, so I would highly suggest having some sort of a track to follow or a map preloaded on your phone. With trailforks, you pick regions to save, and so the lines on the map plus your location should show up even if there's no service.
Riding up inez to pattee canyon is probably the easiest route to follow and ride. The trailhead is about 1/2 mile past the end of the pavement on miller creek road. You climb up the trail, and then you are on road. For the most part you stay on the main road but there is a left turn you have to make. The road going straight will start going down and there's an uphill left. Probably a cairn, arrow on the ground, and/or flagging on trees if you're paying attention. From there the road goes up for awhile and hits the saddle at the top of deer creek and intersects deer creek road. Then you go down. There's a left that takes you past a gate and to the top of pattee canyon, or if you stay on the main road you wind up at the hairpin corner on deer creek road. From there you have plenty of trail or road options to get back from town.
Or, from that same saddle, you can go the other way, continuing up deer creek road. It heads generally south, and you go about 3 miles up to get to the turn to go to the little park descent. This one is a little trickier to follow. There's a right onto what at first glance appears to be an abandoned, overgrown road
Then you come to another road, but you go straight across it and over the bank onto some singletrack. it's marked with a cairn.
The trail is fairly straightfoward to follow. There's a tree down and one part where you kind of have to walk through a bush. Then you're out in the open and descent an old road cut to the bottom of the valley
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