The Adventure

We broke camp and headed up to Taos, NM this morning, i was impressed we were able, with some prework the evening before to get pulled out within about an hour of getting up. The drive up was uneventful as howie managed to find a detour around Santa Fe rather than making me drive the rig through town.
the ride was to be the Elliot Barker Trail. We only had a map, no actual ride description, first mistake. Princess made the right decision and stayed back at the camper. First we stopped at a bike shop on the way to the trail head to reserve our shuttle for tomorrow to do the South Boundary Trail, really has nothing to do with the ride. So up we drove to the pass above Taos at about 9100 feet. There were no real trail markers at all, first bad sign. We took what had to be the correct trail and it went up over some humps that looked like they would be fun coming back. We pushed the bikes a bit but nothing too bad. Then a bit of a down hill where we ran into a couple hikers at a T intersection. From our map we needed to go right but the hikers said the trail that way just went up to the meadow and quit. Well from yesterday we learned our lesson about listing to hikers so we headed right. They were right in a sense that the trail did seem to disappear in the meadow but we found a gate and a sign post that sent us in the right direction. Another bit of uphill and a bit of pushing followed by another downhill. At this point we had about three miles under our belts. We came out to a power line cut and had a decision to make, go to the left on what appeared to be trail but cross the NO TRESSPASSING sign or go to the right on a bit wider trail. We decided not to be scoff laws, and figured this was a pretty well known trail that would not need to have trespassing as part of it. We were wrong. After heading down what was now a definite old road, the GPS confirmed that we were not heading where we should be. We consulted the map, figured where we must be and hatched a new plan. Right on cue we found the next old road we needed to take, fewwww, at least we confirmed where we were. Another left on a pretty good looking dirt road and we were golden, that is right up until we ran into a HUGE gate with no trespassing signs all over it. On to plan B. Rich spotted a singletrack just before the gate so we ended up heading up that. The sign post was missing its board directing us on our travels, but we felt better that at least there used to be a sign there. Im not sure how long we hiked up that thing but it was a while. We finally crested the mountain and found another trail sign that had a number 1 on it but not much useful information. We followed the single track across the ridge until it T'd into a double track, old road type thing. We chose to keep heading back towards where the truck was parked. More climbing on more old dirt roads, continuing to head towards the truck when faced with a direction choice. We ended up heading down on one of these and ended up spying a nice looking dirt road and headed for that. There was a house up there with a couple people out and Rich went to see about the best way to get back to the truck. My fears were confirmed, somehow we went over the ridge, missing the trail we where supposed to be on. The only real way back was to go all the way down through this development and take the road back up to the truck. Normally, not a big deal but there were storm clouds with lightning in the area and the road up was very twisty with no shoulder. The nice lady at the house we got directions at was heading out and offered to lead us down through the maze of roads to the main highway. At the bottom she then offered to take us back up to the truck, the SUV even had a bike rack on it. We graciously took her up on her most generous offer.
Sorry no pictures today