Where Are We?

Like I said in previous posts, we are never really sure what we are in for each day when we set out on our rides. This day was the closest we have ever been to getting panicked about making it back to camp. Our mountain bike “loop” was 36 miles with 4341’ of climbing.

Starting off on forest road 114, we climbed up through the forest on a rough 4WD road. If there weren’t so many darn trees the views along some of the traverses would be amazing! At a big sign board we stopped to read about El Camino Real. El Camino Real is the oldest road in the United States! The road served Indian, Spanish, French and American traders, travelers, and settlers. The first European scouts came along the trail in 1540 to survey pueblos to the north. And, here we were, mountain biking across it.

After this, the trail got extremely overgrown, rough and rutted with crevasses running down and rock jumbles everywhere. Luckily, this part was mostly a descent all the way down into Talpa, just on the outskirts of Taos. So far, it was fairly straightforward and we made good time as we crossed expansive meadows and then hit a section that had giant whoops built up to catch air off.

Winding through an old residential area took us out to the highway for a short distance to Trail 18. We rode this trail the other day and rode it again to get to through our giant loop. Yep, just as much fun the second time! This time we turned on forest road 440 and began the tough slog uphill. Gravel roads are always an unknown but this one was fairly decent as far as the surface goes, and it was shaded as we got into the jungely part of the forest. It was just so steep though! We climbed for a long time and finally stopped to split an energy bar and check the map. We were VERY close to our turn and kept an eye out.

Only, we never really saw it. On Google Maps the road existed. When we had internet we had zoomed in to see it. But in real life we couldn’t find it. We went back and forth on the road a couple times looking for anything and then chose an offshoot that headed across a meadow. I’d never call it a road…ever. Across the meadow, the path was overgrown and steep, so we hiked a bit. At the top it was even more feint and checking the map, we weren’t on the right road. Again, we went back and forth looking for the right road that would put us on our predesigned route. A couple times our dot was close, but the forest was really thick and we couldn’t find a way to it.

We discussed turning around and going all the way back down to the highway and then riding the highway all the way back up to camp, but that would be really far, and we’d have to climb a lot more. Safe, yes, but could we physically ride another 20 miles and climb another couple thousand? Uhg

The clouds moved in and under darkening skies, we debated what to do. Should we turn around? Should we keep going? Should we build a fort and stay the night? Meanwhile, the biting flies found me and I started to lose my shit. We decided to try one more overgrown, stick and rock strewn path and hot damn, about 10 minutes later we popped out on a real forest road. The CORRECT forest road!

Down the mountain we wound on a never used path until we met up with our next section of gravel road. This road would take us to a crossing of the Grande del Rancho Rio. More of a stream really, we crossed and climbed out of the river valley up to the other side. We were almost to familiar territory at this point as we were coming into a section of a ride we did last week. More climbing, a couple raindrops, and some singletrack later and we were back to the road we were camped on. Happy ending!

We completely pigged out on leftover chicken bean potato enchiladas and rested in our reclining chairs.