Subject: Grueling central Az ride.. 2 wr's Sat Jun 12, 2010 10:43 am
Az Tom & i went on a little ride yesterday.. pretty tough.. had lunch at 5pm. More pics & report upcoming.
MeefZah
Subject: Re: Grueling central Az ride.. 2 wr's Sat Jun 12, 2010 1:44 pm
Nice!
andrewlat
Subject: Re: Grueling central Az ride.. 2 wr's Sat Jun 12, 2010 3:40 pm
I have two cousins that live in Flag. We've been through Sedona a few times while visiting. Nice place. The environment is fairly similar to home (El Paso), but with more veg. I might be doing a long trip to Flag over the fall. Any places around there you'd recommend for short day trips on a bike?
rydnseek
Subject: Re: Grueling central Az ride.. 2 wr's Tue Jun 15, 2010 9:21 am
andrewlat wrote:
I have two cousins that live in Flag. We've been through Sedona a few times while visiting. Nice place. The environment is fairly similar to home (El Paso), but with more veg. I might be doing a long trip to Flag over the fall. Any places around there you'd recommend for short day trips on a bike?
Lots of cool places to ride around here.. might consider sheeps bridge if you're here late in the fall.. some pretty tough singletrack is on the north of the mountains, & some other on wing mtn & by the flag airport. check on advrider & TT for flag riders & rides.
rydnseek
Subject: bodie mine.. part 1 Tue Jun 15, 2010 9:23 am
Mayer, Bodie mine, Crown King. 6/12/10
We met in Mayer on Friday at 8:30. It was freezing! I had on mesh jacket & pants, & my fingers were numb riding through the pines. It did warm up some as the day progressed.
It was easy gravel for the first part.. down Poland road unti it became very rugged.
Here's a short clip on the post Poland road. We criss crossed a creek a few times.. nothing too deep, but the rocks are always slippery & tricky. We were going up & down all day.. some of the hills were pretty steep.. they seemed to get rougher & steeper further into the ride.
Tom had some tracks for this ride.. he had also ridden part of it the month before. I made a few waypoints on my gps before going out.. just in case we got off track.. but that wouldn't happen, would it?
Lots of good, challenging riding. We were in the pines early.. nice & cool.. too cool. We were looking forward to getting into the open desert so we could warm up!
I forgot to lower my tire pressures after my ride home from moab last week.. it's like a different bike when you lower the pressures down to 10# or so. The steering feels better, the suspension feels softer, the wheels don't jump around as much.
Stuff like this is easy on the wr with the right air pressures!
We rode along the pines for a bit.. then the flora began to change, as it often does in Az. We were getting into some very dense manzanita, & it was blooming. You can see the brown bark in some of the videos as we wind along the trail. This section of trail was for motorcycles & below.. no quads or jeeps. The path gets pretty narrow in spots.. a branch hit my mirror & spun it loose.. i didn't get it back to functional until i hit the freeway later in the evening.
Tom had told me we were going to have a big hill climb.. i thought this was it. But no, this was a wrong turn. So we went up it, then came back down. Gluttons.
For some reason i don't have audio on the climb.. don't know why. All the other vids are fine. You can see the hill as we approach.
Tom coming down 'wrong way hill'.
My descent..
So we tried turning on another 'road'.. this was not the right way, either.
We were trying to follow a gps track that Tom had gotten from someone. But we weren't sure if it was the right track, or if it was the one Tom had ridden before. No problem. Part of the fun of rides like this is exploring new areas.. taking the path less traveled.
Here's Tom coming down that path!
We dead ended at a steep, rocky, gnarly climb.. even worse than what we had done so far, & more than what we wanted to do. I went up the trail a bit, but it got steeper & rockier. I walk it a little, & saw some 12-16" steps right on a steep uphill curve.. we opted to go back.
I studied my gps map, & it look like we missed the road we wanted back about 5 miles. So we returned down the 'path less traveled', & made it back to the main trail.