Winsor Trail - day three

Princess is not a morning person. For all you that know him, you probably have at least an inkling of that but until you are there when he wakes up, you really can’t understand. He looks like somebody that had way too much to drink and way too little sleep the night before, but he may have had at most two beers and by the time he got up, at least 7 hours of sleep. Luckily his disposition isn’t as bad as he looks and eventually he comes around.

On to the important part, the ride. Today was the Winsor trail, it’s actually the main trail in a network of single track just outside Santa Fe. The plan as written is to do an out and back, climbing from about 7200 to 10300 feet in about 10 miles, sound familiar? The big difference between today and yesterday is singletrack, the whole climb was singletrack, WOOHOO!

The grade was also a little more consistent so we were able to ride almost all of it, with the only extended hike-a-bike near the top, maybe a quarter mile at most. We did spend a good deal of time in granny or near granny though. The track was for the part in really good shape, a mix of dirt and decomposed granite, it reminded me of the trails in Tahoe. The other interesting part of the first 5 miles were the stream crossings, according to princess, 16 of them. The first one I dismounted and took the log “bridge” not wanting to wash the lube off my chain that early. After hitting the next one within a few minutes I quickly realized we just needed to ride them, so we all had wet shoes and socks, but no big deal at all. Princess had the first mechanical of the trip, a cut in his tire that was too big for the Stan’s sealant to heal. Luckily he has good friends that let him have their tube since he didn’t have one with him. The trails are not dusty at all so we have not had any issues with lack of lube on the chains which can be a problem out west. The climb ended up taking about 3.5 hours and the fluffer nutter sandwiches tasted like prime rib at that point. We checked out a really nice vista point, again showing where we had been and where we were going back to, along way below us.

So down we went, video camera on, me trying to keep up with princess and Rich. It was a LOT of fun. The trail just begged to be ridden hard and fast so you had to temper that with your desire not to get hurt too badly. We hit the road crossing and almost ran into a VERY large bull dozer grading the road, luckily we heard it before we saw it and didn’t drop on to the road right in front of it. We waited for Howie to catch up and then down some more. Princess didn’t trust his will not to get hurt so he let Rich go first to try and keep himself from doing anything too stupid, musta worked as he ended the ride pretty much unscathed, and there was plenty of potential for disaster.

We went “off book” about half way down, taking a detour that Mike Mucker had told us about. Howie and I looked at the map at the top of the climb and determined that there would not be much climbing on the detour. The altitude must have gotten to us or the map was not real accurate because we ended up with a healthy little climb and we took Mucker’s name in vain more than once. But the downhill payoff back to the main trail made it all worth while and we forgave Mike. Of course, not learning our lesson, we started out on another detour of Mike’s, this time we were all pretty much just down to our water bottles, killing off the 100 oz of water we had in our packs. After we started up another climb that wasn’t supposed to be there we ran into a couple hikers that assured us that we could not get back to Winsor trail the way we were going. The trail up ahead looked a bit ugly and steep and again, we were close to being outta water so we actually did the smart thing and head back down what we came up back to the main trail. Those last 4 miles or so were a blast and went way too quickly. Total millage was about 24 and I would estimate about 3500 feet of climbing. All agreed, a great great ride.