Mountain Biking in Flagstaff

Jeff

It's been a season of mechanical annoyances -- the valve on my floor pump broke, I ruined a new tube with a pinch flat, I bent my derailleur hanger, and today the cleat on my right shoe acted up. A plug screw on the optional cleat position fell out of its thread, dropping into the front of the cleat, so I couldn't clip in. I tried to fix this on the trail (never set forth without your multi tool!), but the bolt holding the cleat into the shoe stripped -- it hadn't been lubricated in a while, and the silly plug screw may even have been binding it a bit. Of course, all this happened at the outbound apex of the ride. So I rode the whole way back clipped in on only one side -- what a joy.

The "bottom" trail in the Fort Valley area is complete beginner singletrack -- no rocks, no drops, not a bit of technical stuff. But it's been beautifully constructed by our local trail crew, to whom we should send a big thanks for building such a fun trail. It has ups and downs through washes, and lots of twisty sections with perfect radii of curvature for swooping through at speed. They have also built a nice little bridge over one of the more regularly wet washes. Here's part of it, going by one of our patented huge boulders before hooking to the right for a descent into a wash.

I'm not sure what this trail is called, though apparently some locals refer to it as "Dead Elk," for reasons that might be painfully obvious. Regardless, it's a really fun 2.5-mile run. For a blast, do it east to west, using a little connector trail off Schultz Creek Trail to get to the trailhead at Schultz Pass Road. Going this way, the last mile is a gentle, fast descent with lots of curves and, as you can see below, some not too shabby views. The only downside is that you end up dead-ended on FR 162B, at which point you either climp up the FR and its spurs toward the pipeline to get to more curvy descents, or you just turn around and do Dead Elk the other way -- which is not at all a bad choice.

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