Attack of the Cholla

I'm really, really starting to like desert riding. It's so different from everything that I am used to, but it's all fun...minus the Cholla. Those suckers HURT :-)

On Sunday Jason sent Juli and I on a really cool trail called Gila. It had a lot of off-camber switchbacks, and took us pretty far out to where we didn't see any other riders for a long time. I felt surprisingly good considering that I had raced the day before, which was a good thing because there were a few climbs that were super steep and super loose.

Juli hike-a-biking a nasty little climb....it was so loose we could barely walk up it

We had only been riding for a little bit when I had my first run in with Cholla. I didn't even know that I brushed against it, when all of a sudden I felt like my hand was being stung by a million bees. Looking down I saw that I had an entire ball of cholla attached to me.

On a side note, I'm happy to see that I can pose for blog pictures while in pain....(sigh)
Juli and I tried to rip off my glove, but the thorns had attached my glove to my hand. Eventually Juli had to take two rocks, grab the Cholla ball, and rip it out. And what happened next? The Cholla ball bounced onto her leg and the thorns dug in. There we were, in the middle of nowhere, screaming like crazy. At the time it wasn't funny at all, but now I can laugh about it. Especially because I was like, "get the Chaw-la off of me." Trust me, my pronunciation of it is very mid-west :-)

We ended up riding for about three hours, and I could have sworn that all of the Cholla were moving in on us. Just waiting to pounce!

The next day we drove up to McDowell Mountain and got another 4 hours of riding in. Starting out was a little hard as we couldn't figure out how to get Jason's car to go into reverse. He had just watched me try to make toast in a toaster oven that wasn't plugged in, so we decided that there was no way that we were going to go up and ask him how to back up his car.

All it took was a little pushing and we were good to go...We just had to be very strategic in how we parked for the rest of the trip!!!

McDowell Mountain was awesome. We pretty much stuck to the competitive track that they hold races on, but eventually branched out a bit to the other trails. The views were awesome and the trail was so banked that you could pedal hard and then carry a ton of speed.

Juli climbing away....

I have lots of other pictures to post, but now it's time to go get some food. Eat, ride, sleep and repeat. I like this vacation a lot!!!!