Touring *

From State Highway 99, take the V Street off-ramp and turn northeast onto V Street. Cross the railroad tracks and turn left onto 16th Street, which soon veers right to become the Snelling Highway, or State Highway 59. Go up half a mile and turn right onto West Olive Avenue. Take the first left, Loughborough Drive, and follow it as it curves around toward the right. Take a left at Bismark Drive and park a block and a half up where it dead-ends at an embankment next to Black Rascal Creek on the edge of Fahrens Park. From here you can also skate the Bear Creek and the Fahrens Creek Trails, described in the next two listings.

For skaters of all abilities, this trail is a real find: a stretch of perfect pavement following a tule-filled creek with a string of tidy neighborhood parks along the banks. In fact, there's parkland at each end and just about everywhere in between, so consider bringing a picnic, or at least a drink and a snack, so you can savor the scenery that much longer. Although the Black Rascal Creek Trail crosses the pretty town of Merced less than a mile north of a main commercial street, skating here feels rural, and open fields still border some stretches. Other sections are edged by emerald lawns and graced with eucalyptus, pine, aspen, and sycamore trees. From the end of Bismark Drive, begin skating east along the south side of Black Rascal Creek. After skating through a forest of eucalyptus, you'll cross a wooden bridge over the creek; on the other side, you'll come to the intersection that leads to the Fahrens Creek Trail. Turn right to follow Black Rascal Creek through Santa Fe Strip Park to the east. The 10-foot-wide path starts out as asphalt, then switches back and forth between concrete and a quality of asphalt so fine you can't feel the difference. Some nicely designed underpasses where the trail crosses R, M, and G Streets let you skate for at least two and a half miles without any need to stop. In the section between M and G Streets, the trail borders a narrow easement between the creek and some apartment buildings and is in rather poor repair until it reaches the border of North Merced High School. Look east from this open terrain to see the peaks of the High Sierra. After the G Street underpass, you enter the clean and attractive northeast Merced neighborhoods. Here you'll cross two streets without benefit of crosswalks (but very little traffic) before entering Black Rascal Creek Park. Just as this park seems to be coming to an end, take the bridge on the right to return to the south side of the creek, and continue on the last stretch to Rahilly Park. The trail crosses to the far end of the park and dead-ends at Parsons Avenue. Cross the wooden bridge to the park on the north side of the creek so you can relax and get a drink of water. Such agreat skate!