It’s been great being lazy this weekend. I haven’t done much of anything, but I did go for a bike ride this evening. I don’t really like riding on gravel roads, but I wanted to do a longer ride today, so I rode my bike from home and did the Dead Dog Loop. It ended up being about two miles of pavement, 2.5 miles of gravel road, and 2.5 miles of sweet singletrack. The trail started at the bottom of a hill and switched back and forth several times. It was pretty steep, but I was able to ride about 65% of it–the rest I pushed the bike up. At one point the trail traversed a pretty steep slope, and I tried riding up a rocky spot and fell over backward. I landed about six feet downhill from the trail, feet first luckily.
When the trail topped out on the mesa, it went south across a narrow spine with a few ramps on the bouldery sections. I carried my bike over the ramps. 🙂 The mesa widened up again and the trail followed the eastern rim. Near the southern end of the mesa, the trail took a turn west and then north, but I wanted a view from the very south end of the rim, so I rode cross-country to get there. When I returned to the trail, it curved north again and followed the west rim of the mesa this time. Shortly after that I realized that my rear tire was flat. And I didn’t have a repair kit or pump. 🙁 I pushed my bike the rest of the way to the north end of the mesa where the trail started its descent back to the bottom, then I called Traci and asked her to pick me up in the truck and gave her directions. She got there shortly after I’d reached the end of the trail and had started carrying my bike along the gravel road. It’s probably just as well that things worked out the way they did because it rained pretty good during the entire drive home.