Tl;DR: going up was (relatively) easy. Rough roads at the top & going down. Strava.
Surfaces: Mixed. 1st 2/3rds: very good pavement & forest roads. Last 3rd: Horrible. Top 5 worst.
Last night Laurel & Hardy were really killing me. I made some adjustments and lowered my saddle by a quarter of an inch. I figured I’d go look at the bad bad roads, turn around and catch a bus to the Albequerque airport.
The morning started a bit rough, one of my buckles broke, I have a hole in my sock, I was so amped to get going I even spaced coffee.
Once I got rolling things started clicking. I saw the 2nd place racer Ulrich and gave him a rolling hi-five. The road up to the mountain was… Really nice. Well paved, steep (expected), good shoulder. Getting to the dirt road took a long time. And my bum wasn’t bothering me.
And the dirt road was lovely! Well graded, little to no washboard. Several people stopped to say Hi, a park worker who’s name is not Bob but was very friendly (sorry to have forgotten you name friend), Wes from Bike works in Albuquerque.
And the scenery was lovely! Alpine meadows! A lot of them! Folks on the road were friendly like Trail Angel Amy with the Snacks!
And I made good progress – before I knew it I was at the ‘water’ point of interest: basically a small river.
As I was filling up my big water bladder, the cap to it fell into the river. Huge bummer, I wasn’t able to find it even after much searching. But I did discover that my water bottle cap can substitute as a water blatter cap. Since the water bladder can carry much more than the water bottle, I decided to give up on the bottle and use the cap on the bladder.
After a few more hours I was making great mileage and also gaining elevation fairly quickly. At some point I decided that if I could make it all the way to the big peak I would try to head into Abiquiu. Assuming that The descent from 10,000 ft was as straightforward as the approach to it, that should have worked out.
However, the roads above 9,000 ft or so are really really rough. Even the roads descending to abiquiu. In fact, they’re worse. They’re not as bad as the CDT single track I did on the first day, but they are in the top five. Worst roads for sure. Probably the top three. I think I made about 6 mph in descending around 1,000 ft. Since Abiquiu is about 20 mi from the peak. There’s no way I would make it to town while the sun was still up. If the roads were easy I might have considered continuing, but since they were so rough there’s no way I was going to chance an accident just to get to town after everything had closed.
Instead I camped along the side of the road. I should have camped in the Enchantment wonderland, now stuck in the piney scrubs.
But nice scrubs.
Seems like elk go through here a lot.
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