Rick & Lori: March 29, 2015

We spent Thursday through Sunday at the cabin with Vince--Amy was too busy with work and school. My birthday had been on Wednesday and Vince's was on Sunday, so it seemed an obvious weekend for a mountain bike trip to the mountains.

The weather had finally warmed up and most of the snow was gone, so we decided to start exploring new trails again in the James Ridge area. We really hit the jackpot on one I'd been wanting to try since last fall. It connects 2 areas we ride frequently, is very scenic and isolated, and is challenging but not overly technical or difficult. We even rode up on a small herd of elk on this trail which has not happened before. There are a number of other trails in this area that we haven't ridden, and I'm looking forward to trying them out too. After the ride, we made our regular trip to The Western Bar for cheese enchiladas/green chile cheeseburgers, Moose Drools, and coconut cream pie.

On Saturday, we rode from Cloudcroft for the first time since last fall and hit our old favorites: the meadow area, single track in Bailey Canyon, Bailey Canyon climb, La Luz Canyon climb, Wofford Lookout climb. It ended up being 20 challenging miles with really nice weather and extremely fatigued legs. We later went to the Lodge for a birthday celebration dinner and got to watch a beautiful sunset from the dining room and eat a great meal and dessert.

Sunday was Vince's birthday, and we only had about 43.5 miles to that point. It's kind of a cyclist tradition to ride your age on your birthday. On a road bike on flat ground, that wouldn't be a huge deal, but that's practically impossible in the mountains on difficult trails averaging 7 or 8 miles per hour. We decided that riding our ages for the weekend would be a sufficient challenge, so we needed some more miles. Against my better judgement, we did a smaller loop from town which included the single track and climbing back up to Cloudcroft via the Old Cloudcroft Highway trail. It is a difficult climb, and it sucks! I crashed near the top from loose rocks and complete fatigue, but we made it back with 51.5 miles for the weekend and 6000' of climbing. We all three set personal records (via Strava) for most of the climbing segments for the weekend. It was probably the best mountain biking I've ever done and was a great way to start the cycling season.