Rapsure Blog

The last ride I went on that was near Pine Lake. The day before I rode this trail I rode to the end of the rode so that I could figure out the trail head and not waste time trying to find the trail. However on Friday when I rode up to what I thought was the trail and I rode down the closed down rode/atv trail that was off to the right of the the end of the road. The first time I rode down I took the left fork which turned into a loop. So when I found out that the trail I went down was a loop I did it again looking much harder for the trail head and came up empty. So in a last ditch effort before I rode back to camp I went to where the road ended and looked carefully at the trail sign. I noticed that the trail sign was angled slightly towards pointing down the hill. Just to the left of the trail sign was the beginning of the trail.

I finally started to ride down the Henderson Canyon trail and it was rather steep with a steep slope to the sides of the trail. The key is not to mess up and fall down the mountain. Once I got to the bottom of the canyon after descending about a thousand feet I had to deal with very deep washes. I am suspecting that the washes were formed last year when there was a record deep snow pack. I found places so that I could climb down and out of the washes. The washes were deeper than 15 feet which made crossing them difficult. Down in the bottom there was a trail sign for the distance to the end of the Below the Point trail and how much further down the canyon I had to ride to get to the fork for going back up the Burro Canyon trail.

I chose to go on the Below the Point trail. The trail continued through the bottom of the canyon until I reached the other side of the canyon. After I reached the other side I had to ride up the hill and what I thought was a small climb turned into riding up 1,000 feet of steep agressive climbing. The strategy was to sprint through the short extremely steep spots and then slow down to a crawl to recover for the next extreme stint. I was able to ride nearly the entire length of the climb. I ran out of time riding up the trail and so was unable to complete the last mile and a half of trail. Looking at the terrain on Google Earth made me realize that I wouldn't have lost much elevation by going all the way to the end of the trail at the forest road.

I was running short on day light and so I turned around at 7:30PM to ride back. I arrived back down at the bottom of the canyon where the tail signs were and I could ride back up the steep trail which would take me a while to do because of the steepness or I could ride two more miles down and then take the Burro Canyon trail.

I took the turn to the left which lead down to the Burro Canyon trail thinking that since it was longer I wouldn't have as steep of a trail. Once I arrived at the trail head for the Burro Canyon I started to ride up and quickly realized that the trail was rather steep. The trail was as steep as it could possibly be without being a cliff. The first mile was only about half ridable until I got up about 500 feet of elevation climbing. The second mile had another three hundred feet before I was back at the elevation of the camp. The last little bit was done on an ATV trail which wasn't steep. I did stop to put on my bicycle lights once I had ridden two miles up Burro Canyon because the day had passed and was now dark. I made it off of the trail before I completely ran out of daylight which was my goal. I arrived back at camp at about 9:30PM.