Mountain Biking in Flagstaff

Aaron, Antoinette, Byron, Jeff, Rusty, and Stacy

You know, after you've been mountain biking for a while, you start to pick up the trail lingo -- "Rider up," "Four more," "On yer left," "Watch out for dead fish" ... after today, all of these common phrases have come in handy. Details follow.

This is one of our annual epics, like the October waterline ride. The routes vary a bit from year to year, but generally involve Rocky Ridge, a traverse through the Oldham complex, Pipeline, a bit of Fatman's Loop, Christmas Tree, Little Elden, Sunset, and Schultz. Today's loop was 18.2 miles.

We rode out from the parking lot to the Schultz trailhead lot, and then up Rocky Ridge. Here's Antoinette cranking up RR, right about where Lost Burrito comes in from the Dry Lake Hills.

At a rally point at the Rocky Ridge / Easy Oldham bailout, our super-hammerhead Stacy was explaining how to bunny hop the rock in the picture.

"No, no, no, this one's the front wheel..."

Here's Stacy cruising out of the lower end of Easy Oldham (we bagged Lower Oldham this time). A few minutes after I took this picture, I crashed at speed on a loose descent on Pipeline trail. No big deal beyond a slightly stiff shoulder and a thumb that's feeling a little achy as I type this.

We hooked up on Pipeline with Byron and Aaron. Here they are with Rusty and Stacy, rolling east along the wide doubletrack.

Just as we turned up onto the techy singletrack part of Pipeline, Rusty, in the lead, encountered a horribly dead fish in the middle of the trail. Always a courteous biker, Rusty called out the trail alert up in the page title for the rest of us.

Aaron and Rusty cruised into a rally point at the Sandy Seep / Christmas Tree intersection....

...followed soon by Byron (on a new GF 29er) and Stacy.

Here Rusty and Stacy grind through the Sahara section of Sandy Seep. It was pretty navigable this year, with less of a tendency to swallow up your wheels than it sometimes seems to have. I had to wait a few minutes for this picture, since the subjects stopped at extreme upper right to "look at a beehive." Really; that's what they said.

The Sandy Seep area offers some of the nicest views of Elden on the whole circuit.

No pics after here -- we were too busy grinding up Little Elden with slowly tiring legs, and then flying down Schultz. Stacy and Rusty peeled off after lunch at the Little Bear / Little Elden junction to go up Little Bear and down Brookbank. More power to them, but I was ready for the 300 foot climb to Schultz Tank, not the 900 foot climb to Brookbank. By the time I rode back home, my altimeter showed a net ascent of 3,207' on a distance of 27.0 miles, and a total elapsed time of 5 hours 13 minutes.

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