The Rim Trail starts in Cloudcroft and if you have a shuttle or want a big day, it goes for 30 miles. We couldn’t ride the 30 down and 30 back up, so we settled on breaking it into two days. Our first day was 20 miles with 3159′ of climbing. The highpoint of the ride is 9257′ which could be a problem if you aren’t used to elevation. Luckily, we have spent the last 6 months in high altitude areas.
Our ride started at Slide Campground which is closed, but the trail starts outside the gate and then drops down into the campground before continuing. The singletrack generally follows the crest of the Sacramento Mountains, thus the name “Rim”. The riding is probably strong intermediate as long as your comfortable riding on incredibly loose rocky surfaces, roots, and narrow tread. Along the way, the trail winds through pine and fir trees, quaking aspen and green meadows. It’s dense forest so there aren’t a ton of opportunities for big views but we did get a couple looking down into White Sands National Park which we visited back in January.
The ride rolls up and down with a couple sustained climbs but nothing crazy until we turned around and came back. Unfortunately, this ride ends on a climb! We saw no other cyclists though I imagine on the weekends it might get some use.
Dinner update: Derek made pretzels for pretzel dog night. I LOVE his homemade pretzels!! I don’t like regular hotdogs so we had chicken dogs on the grill. It’s so nice to have a chef around the “house”.
Leave a Reply