The Big Kahuna ride shares sections of trail we rode on other rides, and includes plenty of new trail and gravel road as well. We started from downtown Angel Fire earlyish one morning in order to beat any chance of afternoon thunderstorms. The loop is 22 miles with 2929′ of climbing up to around 10500′.
Starting from the visitors center, we weaved through some town trails out to a gravel road climb to the forest. A left turn on a new to us section of Elliot Barker trail led to some tight twisty primitive singletrack downhill, followed by a nasty climb. I say nasty because it’s really steep and rough in parts. That seems to just be the character of this trail. In a lot of places it is hard to even see where the trail is and route finding can be a challenge. It’s pretty remote out here and we didn’t see anyone at all. Just us, trees, and meadows.
We stayed on Elliot Barker trail for a long time, retracing a part we rode last week and enjoyed. This time, instead of turning right after the tough 70 Trail rocky climb, we turned left and took a section of the South Boundary Trail we had yet to ride. Beautiful! This descent couldn’t last long enough, it’s that fun. Unfortunately, it spits you out on a forest road and you descend even more on that. It would be great if trail continued all the way down and I read there are plans for that in the future.
The ride finished with a funny named trail “Lady Slipper”. This trail took us all the way down to Monte Verde Lake, the Angel Fire Resort owned lake. The lake looks like a fun place to kayak or paddleboard, though it isn’t very big. I think some of the houses surrounding it were bigger. Haha. We finished by riding a short section of the highway back to our car.
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