Samaniego Ridge

Photo courtesy of Scott Morris

From the top of Mt Lemmon, we descended off the backside of the mountain on Meadows. Not before long, the cloud cover begin the slowly dissipate, revealing Catalina and Oro Valley some 7,000 feet below. That was temporary. For the first 4 hours of the ride, we were riding in the clouds.

The trail continued to Sutherland before we re-routed off trail to bushwack down Samaniego. It was slow, very slow. Some hikers had previously marked the next section of the trail, although had failed to do any real trail work. Louis hunted for the trail markers and blazed a trail, often choosing some nice freeride lines. At one section, I went ahead (big mistake) and tried to ride a line down a steep rock. Disaster. My derrailleur and hanger bent back so far into my spokes when I hit a tree that we had to turn my bike into a singlespeed (much to the patience and help of Louis).

After about 30 minutes, we continued down some nice singletrack (see picture above). More sweet single track followed as we neared the 50-Year Area, although the few sections of uphill on Baby Jesus forced my skip to jump up and cause some minor problems. Louis' family made me feel like home with some gatorade and pizza. We chatted a bit about the ride. His house is on the edge of the 50-Year Trail, so we had a great time eating and drinking with the route in front of us. I kept looking up and following that crazy line down the mountain, thinking that took us 7 hours and we only rode 12 miles.




12.68 miles
7 hours total, GPS said 5 hours of "moving time" although that might be with all the route finding we did
2381 feet of climbing, 8,005 feet of descending
You can see pictures from SunDog and Krein's last ride here.



Louis gave me a ride home back to my car at Starbucks. The benz managed to start after a few turns. I was not really tired from the ride, although I was a little hungry. My roommate and I dined at Sushi Garden and decided that we would try to have Sushi Sundays when we can. I love Sushi.