Find Parks, Trails &
Other Great Resources

Hikes, Bike Rides & Other
Events & Adventures

The Murrysville Trail Plan
to strengthen our community

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About us

The MTA works to advance facilities and opportunities for recreational trail use in and around Murrysville.  Our interests span all types of trail-based recreation including walking, hiking, road/mountain/rail-trail biking, and cross-country skiing.  We recognize the health benefits of exercise and enjoyment of nature, and value the personal and community benefits of active (human powered) transportation.

Please join us for an activity or a meeting!  We welcome your participation and your ideas about how to advance facilities or opportunities for trail-based recreation.

Join us

There are many ways to participate (all free), and they're fun!

“An engineer designing from scratch could hardly concoct a better device
to unclog modern roads – cheap, nonpolluting, small and silent…”

Rick Smith, International Herald Tribune

“An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”

Henry David Thoreau

“The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward too.”

John Haines, The Stars, The Snow, The Fire

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

Margaret Atwood

“Walk and be happy, walk and be healthy.”

Charles Dickens

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty.
She’s ninety five now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.”

Ellen DeGeneres

“I always loved running…it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power.
You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it,
seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.”

Jesse Owens

“I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least
and it is commonly more than that sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields,
absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Henry David Thoreau

“In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”

John Muir

“Midwest kids got to summer camp.
There is something very special about being away
from your parents for the first time,
sleeping under the stars, hiking and canoeing.”

Jami Gertz

“Bicycles are the indicator species
of a community, like shellfish in a bay.”

P. Martin Scott

“I do not think I exaggerate the importance or the charms of pedestrianism,
or our need as a people to cultivate the art.
I think it would tend to soften the national manners,
to teach us the meaning of leisure, to acquaint us with the charms of the open air,
to strengthen and foster the tie between the race and the land.
No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian;
no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.”

John Burroughs

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving
that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”

E.B. White, Letters of E.B. White

“Walking revitalizes me.
After one day on the trail I become different from the way I am at home.
I am in touch with the seasons, the weather, the varied hours of each day.
I see more keenly. I am aware of the details.”

Marlyn Doan, Hiking Light

“I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.”

Steve Allen (US entertainer and comedian, 1894 – 1956)

“Spring won’t let me stay in this house any longer!
I must get out and breathe the air deeply again.”

Gustav Mahler

“The race does not always go to the swift,
but to the ones that keep running.”

Anonymous

“Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.”

James E. Starrs

“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.
Here was a machine of precision and balance for the convenience of man.
And (unlike subsequent inventions for man’s convenience)
the more he used it, the fitter his body became.
Here, for once, was a product of man’s brain that was entirely beneficial
to those who used it, and of no harm or irritation to others.
Progress should have stopped when man invented the bicycle.”

Elizabeth West

“After you have exhausted what there is in business,politics, conviviality, love, and so on
– have found that none of them finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains?
Nature remains.”

Walt Whitman

“Many communities find that trails and greenways provide the tools
to turn geographic resources into community trademarks
that become focal points of civic pride and key attractors of new residents and businesses.”

“Economic Benefits of Trails and Greenways”, Rails to Trails Conservancy)

“Don’t think, but look!”

Wittgenstein

“Thoughts come clearly while one walks.”

Thomas Mann

“Think of bicycles as ridable art that can just about save the world.”

Grant Petersen, bicycle designer

“Of all exercises walking is the best.”

Thomas Jefferson

“In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough,
and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“Meet the future; the future mode of transportation for this weary Western world.
Now I’m not gonna make a lot of extravagant claims for this little machine.
Sure, it’ll change your whole life for the better, but that’s all.”

Bicycle salesman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

“Walking is man’s best medicine.”

Hippocrates

“Greenways allow us to treat land and water as a system,
as interlocking pieces in a puzzle, not as isolated entities.”

Edward T. McMahon, American Greenways Program, The Conservation Fund

“He who knows the most;  he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground,
the water, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

William Shakespeare

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark,
when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having,
just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road,
without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”

Arthur Conan Doyle

“You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a bike and that’s pretty close.”

Anonymous

“Life is like riding a bicycle; to keep your balance, you must keep moving.”

Albert Einstein