Why drive when you can ride to the TH?

The profile from the route today to 50-year trail and back (my GPS turned off about 10 miles from my house).
I met up with Dave and Eric, along with Vern, Chris and Rogelio to ride the Upper 50. Good times. It is great to get the legs moving again after last weeks punishing race.

I am going to post a few pictures of some of the "urban loop" that I do in order to be able to ride the to trail head. It is a mixture between double and single track. Anyone wishing to ride the urban loop, I hope to do the entire loop in a few weeks. Until then, you can use these aerial shots to ride on the northwest side of Tucson.

El Conquistador Single Track
From El Conquistador, this is a single track that you can take to get to the Circle K on Hardy. The first section is has a nice climb before flattening out to a sandy section. It links up to the wilderness boundary, were you will jump on some single track that skirts PRCA (instead of entering the wilderness on Linda Vista Trail), before dropping onto single track to the Circle K.



Roller Coaster Park
Next is the cross roads of Hardy and La Canada (shown on the far right). There are tons of small roller coaster like sections if you know where to look. If you try to just ride the obvious double track, you might not have very much fun. The singletrack links down toward Omni Golf Course (that is where my GPS died)
CDO Bike Path
Here is the newest Oro Valley Bike Path the connects La Canada and First Ave via CDO wash. This is great for roadies. If you continue on the dirt path, you will end up in front of Honeywell on Oracle.

Wash Connector to El Conquistador
On the aforementioned bike path, you can veer off toward Pusch Ridge in order to connect to the El Conquistador's single track (see first aerial picture).
The Urban Loop (looks like a figure 8)
This final view is an overall view of the entire urban loop, some 40ish miles if you just do the loop (not counting all the side routes you could pop down).


My goal in posting these is to encourage riding on the northwest side of Tucson. We are 10 miles from Catalina State Park, 15 miles from Starr Pass and 24 miles from the bottom of Milagrosa. You can get to all of these trail heads using a combination of double track, single track, and bike paths (along with the occasional road bike path). Why drive when you can ride?