Jennifer Dilworth Hynes — mtbchk

Yesterday we headed over to do “Lunch Loops”.  It’s just outside Grand Junction, and is more of a “local” ride.  The books say that they are more technical.  They are.  We figured we’d start from Monument Road, ride up the Tabegauche Trail and then back down Andy’s trail (since that looked like one of the longer routes and wasn’t a freeride trail) and then maybe hit some other loops.  
 
Well, we chose the Tabegauche Trail to ride up because it looked like the easiest way up, and was a “road”.  Yeah, right.  Let me also point out that we had GALE FORCE WINDS yesterday as a front came through.  I got blown OFF the double track at least twice.  So, this “road” has a section in it called “Widowmaker’s Hill”.  Looks like it could be fun for the DH guys.  Not so fun to try to push your bike up.  After that, it leveled out and I could ride small sections.  I rode some cool rock gardens, and Brian is a witness that I cleaned them.   .  
 
At the top, we turned down the road at the upper trailhead and headed down to Andy’s.  It’s rated (at least most of it is) as one of the milder trails in this fairly technical area, as an M+, which seems to be right where I belong — it’s technical enough to really challenge me, but not so much that I’m walking everything. (E=easy, M=Moderate, M+=Moderate to Difficult, D=Difficult, DD=Unridable for most, Extreme).
 
So, we get onto Andy’s and the wind is whipping around, sand is blasting us, and the trail is exposed on the side of a mountain.  What I would have ridden otherwise, I walked because I was scared the wind was going to blow me off the trail and down the mountain (yes, it was THAT strong).  Then, the trail headed up.  Into large boulders.  Like, Triple-D kind of stuff that was hard enough for me to climb up, and even harder to lug a bike up.  It felt like we were going on a long, very windy rock climb with our bikes.  I looked at Brian and said, “This isn’t fun anymore”.  He was up ahead and said “It gets better from here”.  It did.  
 
The ride down was fun.  I guess the good side of all that unridable “trail” is that if it looked like singletrack, I was going to try to ride it after all that bike-carrying frustration.  I rode a bunch of technical rock gardens and drops that I probably wouldn’t have on Monday.  We rode Andy’s to Eagle’s Tail and then back to the trailhead.  That was fun.  Short, but fun.  
 
At that point, I was tired.  It seems silly, but pushing your bike and rock climbing with it is hard work!  So, we did 7.7 miles in 3 hours!!!!!!
 
It was 80+ degrees Tuesday.  It was snowing sideways this morning.  We’re waiting for it to warm up and hopefully dry out and we’ll probably head over to do the trails in the Kokopellis area that we missed the other day.

Oh, and we went to Hot Tomatos for dinner last night (that’s the place you were talking about, Tom).
 
Four thumbs up for the dee-lish-ous pizza and mountain bike atmosphere!