PHX - Jungle Wash

Went out for Yardstick / jrproper ride today. Also dragged out my buddy Tony for an intro to Sycamore.

Yardstick - KTM 530
jrproper - KTM 450
Tony - Husky 450?
Nightstalker - Honda 450X

Tony, he's got nerves of steel.



jrproper likes to do some yoga stretches before a hard ride.

There are some really great single track trails at Sycamore.



Some of it is slippery off camber.



We ran into some of Yardstick's brutal riding buddies.

And then there's the trails I wouldn't classify as trails, oh, I mean single track.







I was having my doubts that this trail actually went somewhere.

I took a rather large and thick branch to the shoulder.



We finally got out to something that looked almost like a jeep road!



A jeep road for the criminally insane!!



Tony loves hills! Especially ones covered in rocks!



OK, maybe not so much.

jrproper was the last to arrive at the party at the summit.



Fountain Hills in the distance.

It wasn't long until we were on another POS trail!

We finally made it out to log corral road! Yardstick stopped to check tire and found that chain adjusters way out of way and his axle nut ready to fall off.



I was totally overheated from all the slow speed bush wacking. I opted to follow the "Easy" road out and the rest of the crew finished off the day on Pickax. Jeepers on the Log Corral road.



After squeezing by the jeeps, I hit what Yardstick and jrproper referred to as the boulders!

36 miles for me taking the easy way out.

Thanks Terry. I haven't ridden Sycamore in years. It looks as awesome as ever

Looks like fun guys. Bummed to have missed out.

Did you run 2 Gates? That one hill with the boulder at the top and the work around looked like Rattlesnake.

Yardstick, I know you have pics to add.

Terry, is that a tattoo on your arm, or do you wear funky shirts? Nice picks as always.

Actually, I think my pirate tattoo was trying to cut his way through my shirt!!

And here comes the ride video!

<iframe width="853" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uCeL6NqyuTM?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Nice ride report Terry! That looked like some extremely tight areas.

Ok "Dude" looks like one hell of a ride. I think you need to pour yourself a good Caucasian.

Outstanding Video Nightstalker!

I was feeling a bit under the weather all week and planned to ride with Mrs. Yardstick Saturday on our 990, but then the idea of a singletrack ride came up. How could I resist?! We could do the 2-up thing on Sunday, right? So I committed.

Some email conversations with Jrproper got the ball rolling on a loose plan for the ride. I wanted to revisit the supernatural, self healing hill that Slowred and I ran into on the Sycamore Death March, only with a fresh knobby! And I wanted to check out some trails I have traced in Google Earth. Friday afternoon/evening I switched from a partly worn MT-43 trials tire to a fresh knobby I have never tried before.

Later Friday night I went from feeling under the weather to having a full blown ear infection that had me in serious pain and walking sideways into walls. It was too late to cancel and I figured with enough anti-inflammatory drugs in me I could at least do a shorter, easier ride. If you read the RR so far, you know that didn't happen!

We started out on the main trail to/from the Mesquite wash area. I felt okay and forgot about the pain and lack of balance pretty quick, especially when we came up on a group of riders practicing for the slow races. That piece of singletrack is not built for passing, but we needed to get around this group. No amount of my pitiful horn seemed to grab their attention at first. I finally laid into it; MRREEEPPRPRPEEEPPEEEEEPPPEEE! I think it's full of mud or corroded or something. They found just about the least opportune places to pull over and let us by, finally!

Somewhere along the wash to connect to the next section of singletrack I could feel something was not right. The bike was dancing all over and hard to control. It was either that new, untried tire or my ear infection. I kept thinking it was the tire and it just needed to wear in a little. "It'll get better!", I told myself.

Further into the trails and I was still struggling. Occasionally checking the steering damper settings. Still, I was making the hills and felt like I was keeping an okay pace for the fatigue I started with.


Tony lost some momentum on a hill and slowed Nightstalker, who is hiding in the bushes generating dust here.



There he is!



Regrouped!



There's Nightstalker hiding in the back.



I wanted to find a place to check my tire pressures, thinking maybe the gauge I used that morning was reading low and the resulting high tire pressures were the cause of my tentative riding. At the end of the next piece of singletrack we ran into my "brutal riding buddies". My tires did read quite high. But that didn't fix the problem.


We pressed on and found our way into "Jungle Wash".



Last time I was in this wash it was on a KTM 625 SXC. The 530 is like cheating! I think I'd skip this one after a rain, though.

I got to the jungle part on my 625, but I didn't make it this far!



There are some interesting obstacles in there.



I keep thinking it's too bad we didn't get pictures of the really hard stuff.



This is the nice exit after having to run a little ledge and push through a staghorn cholla.



The other option was to stay in the rocky wash bottom.



Finding the Jeep road at the end of Jungle Wash was a relief. Until....

Still fighting the bike and starting to hate my new rear tire, I ran up the hill to catch the rest of Jrproper's climb.






Then the series of Nightstalker coming up!


























I have three videos of Tony coming up that I need to stitch together. That may take a while.

Then came the long version of that hill! I don't think it was as technically challenging, but it was LONG! After a few bad bounces and still fighting the bike, I wanted to stop and take a breather. There just wasn't a good spot for it. I slowed down and just cruised to the top at a leisurely pace.

Tony came up next.



Then Nightstalker.



Then Jrproper.



We made our way back down and hooked up with the end of Lost Hills. Fortunately the Jeep road bypassed a lot of the really hard stuff. :huh



Lost Hills is a rarely used, very overgrown kind of trail in this area. Nightstalker followed by Tony and Jrproper. This part was a surprise. So much water had cut through where the trail crossed washes that there were little drop offs and step-ups in a few spots that used to be challenging all on their own!



Choices, choices! I wanted to check out the supernatural hill, but since I hated my tire so much by this point and we were all feeling the fatigue, we took the bypass to Log Corral Rd.