Blue Mountain Reservation's Centennial Challenge Ends in Nine Days. This Week, the Bridge Is Out.

Blue Mountain Reservation has spent most of its hundred years as scenery. You drive past the Route 6 entrance on your way to somewhere else, or you remember it as the place your kids learned to ride a bike on the flatter carriage roads before graduating to the rockier stuff. For most of 2026 it has been exactly that kind of background presence, until Westchester County turned its centennial into a countdown.

The county acquired the 1,538-acre reservation, which straddles the Town of Cortlandt and the City of Peekskill, back in 1926. To mark the hundredth year, the county's parks department launched a 100-Mile Bike Challenge on Sunday, June 7, running through Wednesday, September 16. Registration is free. What the challenge actually does is convert a park you've been meaning to use more into something with a hard deadline. That deadline is six days away. And this week, the bridge everyone uses to get from one side of the reservation to the other is closed.

A Bike Challenge, Specifically

Here's the detail worth separating from the general summer chatter about "the Blue Mountain challenge." The county's own program page calls it the 100-Mile Bike Challenge, and the instructions are explicit: ride 100 miles throughout the reservation between June 7 and September 16. If you've spent the summer logging miles on foot along the Dickey Brook trail or up toward the ridgeline and assumed those steps were feeding the same tally as your neighbor's mountain bike miles, it's worth checking how your log is actually being counted. The terrain itself makes the distinction matter. Blue Mountain isn't a flat park loop. It's rugged Hudson Highlands ground, glacial boulders, exposed granite slabs, and singletrack that climbs to the summits of both Blue Mountain and Mt. Spitzenberg. A mile on a bike up that terrain is a different nine minutes than a mile on foot.

None of that is a complaint about the challenge. It's the reason the final stretch matters more than the earlier ones. Six days is not a lot of runway if you're closing a gap of twenty or thirty miles on technical trail, particularly while the bridge is closed.

The Detour You're Riding Into This Week

The parks department's own notice, posted on its Blue Mountain Reservation page, states that the pedestrian bridge between Washington Avenue and Virginia Road will be closed from Monday, September 7 through Saturday, September 12. That means the bridge is closed for three of the challenge's remaining seven calendar days. If your usual route depends on crossing that span to link the two halves of the reservation, you're not finishing the challenge the way you planned to finish it. You're finishing it the way the detour lets you finish it, which is a different route entirely.

The math is unforgiving in a specific way. The bridge reopens Sunday, September 13, giving riders exactly four days, Sunday through Wednesday, to make up any mileage that depended on the closed crossing. If you had banked on an easy final week of familiar loops, this is the moment to look at a map instead of assuming the route you rode in July is still the fastest way through.

What the Route Sheet Looks Like Without the Bridge

The reservation has more entry points and trail combinations than the bridge closure affects, which is the useful part of this story. A few named routes worth knowing for the final stretch:

The longest single combination in the reservation, the Boundary Trail linked with the Blue Mountain Summit Loop, runs over six miles and takes about two and a half hours to complete. That's a meaningful chunk of whatever gap remains, and it's entirely rideable without touching the Washington Avenue side of the park if you start from the trailhead near the Sportsman Center or the Blue Mountain Trail Lodge, both of which the county lists as fixed landmarks for orientation.

If the numbers still don't add up by Wednesday, the Briarcliff-Peekskill Trailway is the honest answer. It's unpaved, it's twelve miles long, and it connects directly to the Blue Mountain trail system without requiring the closed bridge at all. It's not glamorous. It's also probably the fastest way to close a real mileage gap in the time that's left.

If You're Sitting This Week Out

Not everyone needs to finish the challenge. Some Cortlandt residents will look at a six-day bridge closure during the year's least forgiving week and decide the smarter move is to spend the outdoor block somewhere else entirely. The reservation isn't the only option in town.

Annsville Creek Paddlesport Center sits on a three-acre section of Hudson Highlands State Park in Cortlandt Manor, just south of the Bear Mountain Bridge, and offers kayak and canoe access to Annsville Creek and the Hudson River itself. It doesn't count toward the county's bike mileage, and it's not trying to. It's simply the other kind of outdoor afternoon available in the same five minutes from home, for anyone who'd rather paddle a sheltered stretch of the Hudson than reroute around construction fencing.

For a landbound alternative that has nothing to do with the reservation's closure, Camp Smith Trail runs from the old Toll House at Route 6/202 out to Anthony's Nose, connecting into the Appalachian Trail with expansive views along the way. It's a different kind of hike than anything inside Blue Mountain Reservation, longer sightlines, less technical footing, and no detour to plan around.

Why the Timing Actually Matters

A hundred-mile challenge sounds like a nice round number the county picked because it's easy to promote. What makes this particular week worth paying attention to isn't the number. It's that a century-old park, one that's mostly functioned as a fixed part of the Cortlandt landscape, suddenly has a real deadline attached to it, and that deadline landed on the exact week its main crossing is out of service. That's not a coincidence anyone planned. It's just how a maintenance schedule and a centennial calendar happened to collide, and it means the days through September 16 will look different for anyone who's been treating the reservation as a standing appointment all summer.

Whether you're closing out the last miles on two wheels or deciding to spend the week on the water at Annsville Creek instead, the park is doing something it hasn't done in a hundred years: giving Cortlandt residents an actual reason to check the map before they head out the door.

If you're the kind of person who tracks details like a bridge closure before you plan your Saturday, you already understand what makes a place like Cortlandt worth knowing well. That's the same attention The Danielle Reese Team brings to every conversation about this corner of Westchester County, whether you're asking about a trail or a town. Let's start a conversation.