a varied ride

I never get tired of riding my bike, but sometimes riding the same places isn't so exciting. This can be an issue here in ABQ because there aren't that many roads outside of town. By roads, I mean paved roads. On Sat, we decided to seek out the forest roads in the east mountains, unsure of what was in store. We hopped on our trusty steeds, Jill on her road 'race' bike with slightly fatter tires and me on my cross bike with same 28 mm tires.



I drew a picture of the roads that are shown on google maps (we almost never need to print anything so we don't have a printer) and made a plan to hit Forest Rd 462. 462 starts out as a single lane gravel road that is quite steep at the bottom. After a mile or so, there's a small sign that points up a rock wall, and the difficult part begins. Lots of loose rocks and some boulders made the going tough for us 'roadies'. I had to walk at least 2 sections, and Jill walked a few more.

As an aside, here's the short answer to why we didn't ride mtn bikes. The gravel road is about 15 miles from our apartment. A road bike is usable on most dirt trails and excellent on pavement. A mtn bike is very nice on dirt trails and usable on pavement. We prefer the former. The unspoken alternative is to drive to the trail, but let's leave that unspoken.



We met up with a couple riding their brand spanking new full suspension mtn bikes who asked us if we knew where we were. I pulled out my drawing, he pulled out his 1998 trail book, and we guessed our location. He was very surprised that we could ride road bikes there. In fact, he later told us that he told his wife that if he saw us again up the trail he would sell his not needed mtn bike on ebay. He saw us after they turned around to head back.

I really hoped that my drawing was correct, especially the scale, because we were getting hungry and we appeared to be in the middle of a large forest. The options were to turn back and ride (okay, walk) mostly downhill over the rocks or to press on to parts unkown. We pressed on and found much better going. Soft dirt roads with large gullies made by 4x4 wheels worked well for us. We rode in the middle.

We exited the forest in a neighborhood several miles east of 17 at I-40. Guess what wasn't too far away? That's right, for the 3rd Sat in a row, we had burgers at Burger Boy. We can't do everything different every time.