Day 18 – Deadfall to Ghost Ranch (Canones National Recreation Trail)

You win some, you lose some.

Yesterday’s hot springs route was a total win.  Today’s National Recreation Trail, not so much.

I’m not going to say it was a lose, because we enjoyed it on many levels, but it sure wasn’t a sweet singletrack descent.  More like a log filled, never traveled trace of a trail.  Which, for our purposes, and today, was just fine.

We started from our camp above the hot spring — early.  Eszter’s stomach got us going early, which was fine by me.  Our camp sittin’ log was angled perfectly to watch the sunrise develop, and we had a killer view from atop the cliff.

We made our way up to the divide route and within minutes came across Rick’s camp.  It has been fun to leapfrog with him along the divide, share stories and encouragement.

We kept climbing up to 10,000 feet replete with meadows bursting with yellow dandilions and grass so green it hurts your eyes.  This is the promise of the great divide route…

But we turned off, to descend an unknown road to an unknown trail.  I hadn’t even had a chance to scope it out on TopoFusion.  We had just seen it on the forest map that I purchased in Cuba.  The ranger told us it hadn’t seen trailwork in at least 5 years, maybe more, but didn’t seem to know much else.

The possiblity of a 7 mile non-CDT singletrack descent, on Wilderness detour was just too tempting, so we went for it.

The trail is not signed anywhere, despite its NRT status.  We had trouble finding the start.  We had trouble finding the middle.  We had trouble finding the end.

But we did follow it, and at first it was glorious.  Water bar descent through trees, and someone had poached it on an ATV, creating bypasses for many of the downed timber. 

Once in Canones Creek’s drainage itself, it opened into green meadows and dandilions of the sort we had only ridden on roads up on the divide.  To carve tiny singletrack through it was too good.

We saw several groups of cows, many of which did not want to give up the trail/meadow.  We even saw two bulls fighting and butting heads. The rest of the herd ran from us but they ignored us and kept fighting.

So the upper part was pure magic.  Once we got into the trees it was clear that most of the forest was dead, which meant: deadfall.  Hundreds of trees to carry bikes over.

Oh well.  Luckily there were nuggest of great trail that we did ride.  More like tiny little morsels than any extended rallies, but it did keep the stoke level up.

Speaking of that, it takes a rare person (in my opinion) to enjoy or even tolerate a trail like this.  Most people, most mountain bikers, would simply not be happy and things would go downhill quick.  I only know a very few people who thrive on this kind of thing, the adventure and the exploration, and boy am I lucky to have one of them right here with me.

But it did take a toll — ~4 hours to travel 7 miles.  Climbing away from Canones Creek on real singletrack (imagine that!) And then 2-tracks hurt.  It was nearly all downhill into Youngsville, and even down to Abiquiu Lake, but we were pretty fried.

The maps told us there were bike trails!  And there was an off-highway route to Abiquiu, where we needed to go to resupply for the next stretch.  But storms were a-brewing and legs were a-lacklustre.  We opted for the b-line to Ghost Ranch, and boy was that ever the correct life choice.

It’s incredible here.  We met many cool hikers, the backdrop is drop dead gorgeous cliffs, it’s quiet, we had an all-you-can-eat dinner, there’s wifi, and the skies just unleashed as we sat on the patio.  I *love* a good thunderstorm — when there’s a roof overhead.