South Boundary Trail

The ride today was the famous South Boundary Trail. It was on the same ridge more or less as the ride we tried to do yesterday so I was a little nervous about the navigation. It involves a shuttle, that is we paid the owner of one of the local bike shops, Gearing Up, to drive us around and up to the trailhead at about 9800 feet. Since he needs to open the shop at 9 or whenever he does, we had to meet him at the shop at 6:45am so he could get back in time. Princess was not particularly happy with that timing but managed to have his butt in the truck at the appointed time. Rey was great, really nice guy and gave us a number of tips about the trail as well as an overview of the whole bike scene in the area, the forest service issues etc. So about an hour after we dropped the truck at the end of the trail, we started out on trail 164. That was at an elevation of about 9800 feet and we still had almost 1000 feet to climb before we started across and down.

Not that there was no more climbing, but for the most part it was rolling between 10400 and 9500 for about 17 miles. It was a combination of extremely sweet single track and some jeep trail. The trails ranged from winding through alpine meadows with wild flowers to sweet bench cut trail through pine and aspen trees.

With the rain they have been getting in the area the trail is in mint condition, not a bit of dust anywhere and for the most part just a nice bit of tackiness to help keep the rubber side down. For the most part it was pretty well signed but the gps track I had downloaded did come in handy a couple times. I think we did a bit of bonus millage as we followed the 164 trail signs rather than at least one set of directions and the gps track but managed to get back around to where we were supposed to be. We ran into some cows a few times and saw a few mule deer that could hardly be bothered by us. After about 18 miles we started to head down and the trail got more technical, loose rocks , switchbacks, and steeper trails as we descended from the 9000 foot range back down to 7000 feet. 21.5 miles and 4.5 hours later the muscles in our faces were a little fatigued from grinning so much.