Thursday, December 02, 2010

Cowboy Trails

If I was to say "Mountain Biking in Las Vegas," without doubt the first trail that would come to your mind would be Bootleg in Boulder City. And rightly so, there are some fun shuttle-able trails.

Last year, I had the opportunity to ride the Blue Diamond Trail system (click here to see pictures). Since my family lives in Las Vegas, I trend to visit with the bike on an annual basis. I new the Cowboy Trails near Red Rock could possibly provide the needed excuse to live the city (key word city, we tend to avoid the strip).

The best part of the Cowboy Trails is the non-existent trailhead. When you pull up, the big Horse Stables sign leaves little wonder to the imagination. In fact, if I did not know about the trails, I would simply drive by and think it was a private ranch.




I think I could show you the Bunny Trail backdrop and that would simply convince you to visit these trails. Check out that background.




From the Bunny Trail, we continued on to all the Fingers, as they call them on the signs.









Most of these sections would be great for any intermediate rider.















Photos of me by Kendall Gin
















As the trail nears the top, you veer off to Fossil Trail, then over to Sars and Anti Sars. I didn't really have a printed map nor GPS handy, simply followed the bike tracks around the mountain.




After the radio towers, you top out at this view of Las Vegas.




But the real view was this fun ridge that you got to ride on. The trail got progressively difficult as you descended.











Veering right at the saddle (where equestrians tie up there horses). You have 3 options. The first right will take you down to Bomb Voyage (which apparently is new). The second right is Bob Gnarly and continuing past both of these turns will take you near full circle back to the Boneshaker.

We chose a combination of the two, headed down Bob Gnarly (not recommended for intermediate riders, this is an advanced trail).




And over to Bomb Voyage, the steepest trail in the entire network. This is a fairly new trail (no tracks on the trail) that climbs up and around to a group of rocks, then over to Ridge Ride/Three Amigos.









It's a beautiful trail, as you can see; but you really have to enjoy climbing to enjoy it. The contouring at the beginning turns into some steep ups....very fun stuff.




Some sweet trails. Click here to see the map of the network. Note that Bomb Voyage is not on this map. These trails are rarely used, especially some of the trail on the north side. It's a shame given the scenery, technical aspect and rideablitiy. Hope to get up there again and explore some more trails near the north of the Red Rock State Park.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

holy cow that is beautiful! nice pics both of you.

Ty

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