Caliente, Nevada isn’t new to us, we passed through here a couple years ago and rode a lot of the trails in the area. For a tiny town surrounded by not much, there is a good amount of fun riding and we stopped back through on our annual southern migration.
Last time we rode the upper part of Ella Mountain Trail out and back and you can see that here. This time we rode a loop incorporating the bottom 14 miles of Ella Mountain Trail – so all new trail for us. This is a tough trail because it’s pretty long to do an out and back on the whole thing, and doing a loop requires riding up a rough dirt road. If you have someone to shuttle you, that’s an option but it’s a long and rough drive. We rode up the dirt road to the Upper Ella Mountain Parking area and cut in to take trail down.
The first part of the trail we rode is pretty tame with wide tread through juniper and pinyon pine. It winds around the hillside and gets pretty narrow in some spots. In general it’s a downward trending ridgeline but there is still climbing sprinkled in. The soil is tough to build trails on around here with lots of sand that isn’t really moldable. It’s thick decomposed granite in spots, not true sand.
Honestly that first part was a bit boring but that changed the lower we got. The character definitely changes and the trail gets interesting. Fun flowy sections, some extremely narrow trail and lots of natural landscape beauty spiced it up. The bottom 15 miles is intermediate and has some challenging sections but well worth the effort.
Fun day in Caliente.
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