Jul 13, 2008

Hawes and Pass Mountain - Mesa, AZ

Met up with few MTBR riders at Six this morning at Walgreen's Parking Lot for tour of 26.7 mile tour of Hawes and Pass Mountain. DurtGurl lined up a nice summer time route that knocked about 6 miles off the normal ride. We skipped the circumnavigation of Pass Mountain, which normally includes the uber-fun gnar. But the counter clockwise decent was actually pretty fun. And on the return we went right by the big PHOENIX mountain; and went up and over the towers. Actually the decent was pretty freakin' gnarly, due to the storm last week which created some nasty ruts and move some big time rocks onto the trail. Couple this with the sensation of riding on ball bearings, you have some pretty thrilling decent. However, I wouldn't suggest this after riding about 20 miles.

I felt good during the whole ride. The climbs were an absolute breeze, and the weather was a lot less painful than I had anticipated. I was actually a little concerned about trying to do such an ambitious ride in the middle of summer. But the temps cooled down, and we had a persistent cloud cover up until the last hour of the ride. We really lucked out cuz the way I see it, when you ride in AZ, you are messing with death if you are on the trail after 9:30 am in the summer. And today, we didn't finish the ride until after 12:00. Phew. Here's a link to surfndav's ride stats, and here at MTBR is some more discussion about the ride.

Anycow, I shot some vid today, and I used helmet cam 2.0. Unfortunately 2.0 needs a little refinement. And we ran into the international mountain biking Celebrity, 'Hucking Kitty', on the trail today. Here's the vid:

2 comments:

tims said...

Great vid! Sorry I missed the day, looked like some epic fun!

-tim

u2metoo said...

Hey Tim-may!

Dood, sorry you missed out. Legs are still in recovery mode. That, and I'm still amazed the weather was a tolerable as it was.

Peace and Chicken Grease!