Riding the Rails

What started out as just a simple, 1-hour urban ride today turned into something semi-epic. After finding some new sections of double track that connected me to frontage road, I quickly realized that I could now connect my urban loop to the Tortolitas. How might this be able to work? you might be asking yourself Well, Union Pacific is widening the train track this year from Casa Grande to Tucson (cross bike anyone?). The resulting ride looks something like this:


Not exactly singletrack, but eventually this will lead to some double track and later singletrack. I left the train track and rode through some cotton fields to get to Tangerine Road/Powerline Road on the State Trust Land just west of Dove Mountain.


Before connecting to the Power Line road off of Tangerine, I managed to find this little gem in the middle of the ride. Perfect timing.


Success at last. I had to squeeze around the Ritz Carlton Golf Course and ride some more road (total road in the entire one-way ride, .2 miles) to get to the Wild Burro trailhead, but alas I made it in time to get some singletrack before the night section of the ride started.

I rode a little bit of Alamo Springs, it was a combination of hike-a-bike and clumsy, night riding. Not a trail that I would recommend for the average mountain biker especially at night.

The route back to the urban loop was nice on the dirt section of Dove Mountain Boulevard (which goes all the way to Tangerine). I managed to jump on some dirt roads to get to Blue Bonnet and then to Oasis and Camino de Oeste, before finally getting back the the urban loop.

I have not posted a picture of myself in quite sometime, 'tis about due for a new update since I have a beard now.



Total ride time: 4 hours. Not too bad for an "urban" loop.
Approximate mileage of paved roads: 3 of the 30+ miles