Since I don't own any long pants worth riding in other than Levis it's
pretty difficult to get me riding anywhere other than on my rollers in my
wind-protected backyard (the amount of heat generated while riding in place
is pretty amazing) when it's under 45 degrees out. As some of you may be
aware we're having some unseasonably cold weather here in SoCal at the
moment:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/hail.jpg
That was from Saturday while I was trying to bleed my rear brakes in the
backyard. It's Southern Freakin' California for goodness sake, it don't
hail here! Even when it got down to 38 the only time I wished I'd had long
pants on was when the hail started stinging my legs.
Given all that when I received a call from JD I was very motivated to get
out into some desert goodness after getting bored with riding my 29er the
last few weeks. JD wanted to check conditions of the trails in the Santa
Monicas but I know the only way to avoid muddy trails during weather like
this is to get out into the good ol' sand and DG of the desert. My plan was
to ride old motorcycle trails in the hills between Rosamond and Edwards Air
Force Base. Unfortunately those plans were denied as there is now a nice
taught barb-wired fence around the outer-outer-outer-outer perimiter keeping
the good stuff locked up for base personnel-only. This is Rosamond Dry Lake
one of the secondary landing dry lakes at Edwards:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/rosamond.jpg
Not too dry.
JD getting a feel for the lay of the land at one of our first high points:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/jd.jpg
We basically would climb a hill, look for trails to another hill, climb that
to survey, and lather-rinse-and-repeat.
A kinder and gentler JD leaving the good weather:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/trademark.jpg
And climbing towards the bad weather:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/climb.jpg
It's amazing that so close to civilization no one bothers to look in the
bushes for a nice trail. One of the many little singletracks we found:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/single.jpg
After circumnavigating the shotgun shell covered hills in the background,
making sure that we weren't in the line of fire of the two groups of yayhoos
blasting the junk fridges and bombed out cars into oblivion, and checking
out a couple mines we found a perfect trail winding through the creosote
bushes straight back to the car:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/finish.jpg
And after successfully negotiating through the poser skiiers driving like
idiots in the hail on Hwy 14 we were awarded with a rainbow that got
amzingingly bright and focused just 20 minutes further down the road after I
took this shot:
http://homepage.mac.com/getosx/rosamond/rainbow.jpg
Even with the cold and desert trash it ended up being a good day where we
just rode around in the desert. Simple as that. We mostly were able to
stick to the firmer high ground but there were a couple of points where we
got slogged down in the sand and had to walk a couple of hundred yards. I
think it was a better experiment than our first one last spring. And it
would be a place to return to if we could access the trails on the outer
perimeter of Edwards AFB like those motos who preceded us used to do.
We capped it off with al pastor for JD and carnitas for me at Tortas de
Mexico, and a shot of El Tesoro at home.
Greg