Buffalo Creek

Last night I was too verbose in my blogging, so out of respect for you, reader, I'll keep this short.

Here's the Garmin log.

I hadn't initially planned on it, but I went back to Pine Valley again. This time I went a little further down the road and started at Buffalo Creek. The first part of the ride followed Buffalo Creek Road and was a snowy and icy in places; unrideably so in some spots.

Baldy Trail took me north and up, away from the creek. Up, up, up! I love to climb! There were some nice flat slabs of granite around mile seven that beckoned for a little break. The slabs might be the top of a huge dome, I suppose.

Baldy was gravelly, but soft in partial shade and frozen in full shade. Millers Trail is a double track along a wide flat ridge in the trees. It was a gradual descent, but there was too much deep snow for it to be much fun.

Charlie's Cutoff, which I had done yesterday going uphill, wasn't much better going the other way. There was too much snow and ice. It was fun in a challenging endurance sport sort of way, but it most definitely was not like going down the curly slide at the playground. Homestead was better; it playfully twists over and among granite boulders and slabs in a gradual descent. It's a definite favorite, but a with a warm evening and a warmer day today, it was also a little softer and wetter than it was yesterday.

I passed the site of yesterday's crash and reached Sandy Wash Trail, which was mostly dry and almost entirely downhill swoopiness; a roller coaster ride to back down to Buffalo Creek, which made up for quite bit of the grunt work I'd done over the previous 12 miles. Check out the Garmin log to see how much faster those last few miles were, and if you haven't before, try using the Player on the Garmin site.

The continual transition from slush to gravel made a mess of my bike. The worst was really the descent down Buffalo Creek road as I returned. The air was warm, the snow was thawing, and the road was turning into a stream.

 

I hope to make many return trips to this area. It would be so much more fun to do it with the whole of scaq instead of by myself. However, given the intensity of the climbs, we'll wait to attempt it until everyone is well-acclimated and has logged some miles at lower elevation on some flatter trails. This is not what I'd call a good starter ride.

The next two weekends I'm back in Michigan where winter still holds a firm grip, so no more mountain blogs from me for a while.