I recently went back to North Carolina to spend a bit of time with my parents. I carved out some time at the backend of the visit to get up in the mountains and play some MTB. Dupont State Forest did not disappoint
Category: General MTB
The Cowboy Trails
So I have recently pushed out a couple of videos on the Cowboy Trails of Las Vegas. The first one was from the “Vintage” Vault of 2006 and the second one was from a ride from about a month ago. I have ridden the Cowboy trails a handful of times between the recording of these two videos and I had finally gotten through the three main down hills routes off of the ridge. I suppose you could do some laps out here and do more than one downhill in an outing but for me I have usually had my fill after one. There is a lot of MTB per mile out here.
For the downhills:
- Boneshaker: Oh man this is a fun descent that will test your skills. There are some nice drops and other technical features that will keep you on your toes. This was featured in my vintage video of my first visit here.
- Bomb Voyage: I consider this the most technically demanding route and has some squirrel moves coupled with some exposure. It feels the scariest.
- Bob Gnarly: I heard this trail described as “90s Downhill Tech”. For those of you that are not of that vintage I would call it “On the Ground Tech”, It is often tight, twisty and narrow. Not bermy bike-park vanilla flow stuff. I consider this the easiest of the three descents but not easy.
Rock Garden: This is not only the list. While you could ride down it, the main traffic it sees is the the equestrian tourism traffic which I find the trails to typically be chewed up and riddled with horse poo.
No matter which route you take if you like rocky desert tech you should have a good time out here. If you need a bike, both the Trek and Giant stores in town typically have rental bike available.
Lagunas Camping
The Laguna Mountains are one of my happy places. Nichol and I spent the July 4th holiday weekend (and then some) at the Laguna Meadow campground.
We really love this area not only for cool trails right from camp but also for it just being an awesome place to just to chill outdoors. One of the things we like about it during the July 4th weekend is the lack of fireworks. Within hearing distance of our home are several annual fireworks events that pretty much keeps are dogs traumatized for the bulk of the Independence Day evening. Life is just better for our dogs (and us) up here away from the boomage.
Did I mention trails? I already posted up about checking out Garnet Peak, but I hit most of the stuff in the area over the course of the trip.
The nice thing about camping here is that you don’t have to try and hit everything at once. Some trails in the morning. Some in the afternoon. Hell, why not a post-2nd breakfast ride?
Chilling and Grillin 
Check out “Observe A Thing”
Then of course there is hammock time. Yeah we had a great time!
Garnet Peak
I have been talking about doing Garnet Peak with a couple of my buds off and on for years. The themes of the conversations have usually included phrases like ” Its worth checking out”, “Oh yeah it chunky” and “You will probably like it”. So while camping in the Lagunas over the July 4th weekend, I decided to give Garnet Peak a go. This is a short (2.4 miles out-and-bike) hiking trail that bikes are allowed on. The trail is accessed right from Sunrise Highway if you are on a bike. Hikers can additionally access it via the PCT trailheads at Penny Pines or Pioneer Mail.
The trail starts off easy enough and appears to be an old road bed. The trail supposedly gets lots of use but it was not too apparent on this day. The trail narrows way down and steepened up just before it crosses the Perfect Cycling Pacific Crest Trail. The raw chunk factor steps up as well. I do enjoy this type of slow tech climbing…for a while. At some point I was “Yeah, I know how to climb this stuff but hiking it is easier. I feel I did climb a solid amount of this trail but with plenty of stops. Often times it was stop and eyeball the line for the descent. Sometimes I just told myself that knowing the real reason was I just did have the willpower to keep throwing down the grunt.
The chunk of the trail often dictated a climbing line not dead center of the trail. This is where the chapparral brush took its toll. I had some good exfoliation going on by the 2/3rds mark up. I highly recommend some knee/shin guards or pants for this alone.
The views expanded as a I neared the peak. First it was to the North and Northwest. The Palomar Observatory was easily seen in the distance. Closer is a prominent reddish rock formation that you can’t help but wonder what is out there. There is a barely discernable path out to it from the trail when the formation is right off your left shoulder. (Thats Port Beam for you Navy Schallywags). It’s worth a scramble around.
The last 50 feet to the summit are not what I call doable unless you are a trials rider. The juxtaposition of the Anza-Borrego Desert and Mount Laguna made for some impressive views. It was clear enough on this day to see the Salton Sea and beyond. This peak is known for being one of the windiest spots in the county and that certainly seemed to be the case on this day.
The descent was challenging with a high requirement for precision. Boy the exfoliation factor was climbing rapidly and becoming uncomfortable to distractingly painful everytime a brush touched already “treated” skin. I did not ride everything I put on my “ride list” while on the uphill scouting climb. The common theme with everyone of these balks was I would have to take an off center line than ensured more lower leg treatments.
This trail was fun, with momentary hints of Type II fun. The trail is really too short breech into full blown in the moment misery. Garnet Peak might end up as an annual affair but next time I will bring some lower leg protection. I would not come out to the Lagunas just to do this trail but if you are a regular you might want to spice up one of your loops by adding this trail.
UPDATE
Here is the video from this outing
Black Mountain and Lusardi
I am doing the Archipelago Ride in a few weeks and I need to continue toughening up the “leather” in strategic locations. I did a Black Mountain loop that I do on a regular basic and then added on the Santa Luz/Lusardi Loop.
For my Black Mountain Loop I started from Black Mountain Park and work my way up to the peak via the main fireroad. I then dropped Black Widow and then took the fireroad back up and cut over to the east ridge trails that included Manzanita, Little Black Loop and Nighthawk trails.
Lusardi 
Lusardi 
Lusardi 
The trail ahead
I then connector over to Miner’s Ridge Loop, then Lilac and Ahwee back to Black Mountain Park. I was feeling pretty good when I rolled out for the Lusardi Loop but main was I dragging on the final climb to finish that loop off. I did 23 miles and 3,600 feet for day. Beer:30
Turning 20!
How time flys! MountainBikeBill.com turns 20 today. When this thing started it were no smartphones, high speed data, GoPros and YouTube. Even a hand-held mapping GPS was a tough thing to come by in those days.
Thank you all for the motivation to share my love for the outdoors and mountain biking over the last 20 years!
The site came about as more of a progression of information vice a thought out plan. While I do consider my time in the 80’s riding my 10 speed on old logging roads and game trails of North Carolina mountain biking (Or should dare to say Gravel Biking), I got into I got into modern MTBing in the late 90s here in San Diego.
I love the exploring aspect of the sport and it was much more exploratory in nature back then. Bringing along a guidebook on a ride was very much a thing. Before long I was checking out places “not in the books” and friends would want me to lead rides or explain to them how they could get there. This lead to hand written directions and maps that got photo copied and passed around. Then came scans and me putting hosting on my cox.net personal account. Somewhere along the line I picked up the nickname Mountain Bike Bill. On Feburary 6th, 2002, MountainBikeBill.com became a thing.
If you want a historical chuckle you can check out these historical nuggest of the site that I’m probably going to leave as is and make a whole next page.
- GPS and TOPOS! https://mountainbikebill.com/GPSandTOPOs.htm
- Best Viewing Methods HAHAHA https://mountainbikebill.com/BestViewing.htm
- The FAQ section is horribly outdated https://mountainbikebill.com/FAQ.htm
The site has gone through four major revisions over the years, and while I should have moved to some type of content management system long ago, I will probably keep the old school html thing going. I latest bit of work involves migrating all the pages to a mobile friendly format and tweaking the GPS files to work better with more simplistic mobile applications. Moving videos to my YouTube channel is also another thing to do when I am not doing life stuff like you know, riding a bike and loving on wife and dogs. Then there is that whole pesky work thing.
So thank you all for the motivation to share over the years. While social media in its various forms calls into question the relevance of websites and blogs these days, I plan on keeping this thing going for the foreseeable future. So if you like bad grammar, misspelled words sprinkled with some MTB blabbage stick around.
Sweetwater Bike Park
The Sweetwater Bike Park has been around for a few years now but I had yet to make my way down there to check it out. I was interested hitting up some the trails in area so this was a good fit.
I have say this Park is quite a bit of fun. There are a couple of jump lines, a couple of flow lines, a couple of walls and some other assorted MTB skills development bits. It is quite a nice asset for the community.
After getting my fill of the place and chatting up some of the locals I headed out to the Sweetwater trails.
I primarily worked my way up to the top of Rockhouse from the backside. (The front side trail was eat up with hikers). After the
From the summit I dropped down into main trails area and a few loops before making my way back to the park where I had started.
I had forgotten that this area (outside of the trails up to rockhouse) have a lot more climbing to them than the layout would lead you to believe. I did about 14 miles with 2,200ft of climbing. It was a mighty fun day on the bike.
Mt Gower Snooping
This another one of the places that has been on my check out list for quite some time. Typically whenever I had interest it was in the heat of summer which this area has been known to be mighty toasty.
That was not the case on this day when I set out to do some snooping. I started off heading up a forest service road that good lists as Eagle Peak road which I’m pretty sure is not right.
I really enjoyed the views on the way up the climb. Eagle Peak as well the north end of El Captian Reservoir visible and the “new” angles to them were very cool.
I found a single track just past the end of the forest service road. Well I should say the boundary of the Forest Service land. The road was kinda deconstructed at that point. A short bit beyond that spot I picked up a downhill singletrack that quickly dropped back onto Forest Service land. This singletrack mighty fun.
I soon came to the junction of a route known as the Mt Gower transverse. It appears to see little use from the east end of it that I was at. I hear there are some high quality rock slabs to play on but getting up to the requires a lot of work. I was starting to get rained in so nixed any thoughts hike-a-biking up to those the mountain.
I did indeed get rained on quite decently on the trail back down into the community that I started in. It however stopped raining just as I came off trail so I decided to do some more wandering in the are. More goodies of questionable status were found. I’m looking forward to getting back out there to snoop around some more.
New Bike!
Well it has been nearly five months in the works but I have a new steed in the stables
Before that I spent a long time mulling over (ok more like nuking out) all the details. 27.5, 29, mullet, trail, enduro etc…
I settled in on an Enduro style rig and my top three contenders were the Ibis Mojo HD5, the Santa Cruz Bronson V4 and the Ibis Ripmo V2.
With my current rig being a Bronson V1, I was jazzed on paper with the V4. Once I got my hands on a Bronson V4 just did not feel right to me. The weight distribution just felt off.
The Ripmo on the other felt balanced and relatively light in comparison. After a test ride I was in. I spent week thinking about which factory kit or a custom spec build up. I ended up going with the mostly AXS/XX1 kit with some swap outs. The primary swap outs were the wheels and brakes. I went with Hope e4 brakes and tech 3 levers because I love them and did not feel the need to venture from them. The wheels were a custom build using Onyx hubs to We Are The One Union rims.
I have had the bike out for a handful of rides to date and those have all involved getting the bike dialed in and getting acclimated to the bigger wheels and longer wheelbase. The geometry change has been less of an issue on the climbs than I expected. Coming in at a fart under 31lbs, this bikes feels really good under foot when you have to your Billy Goat on.
Pointing the bike downhill is pretty confidence inspiring which was the weak area of my Bronson V1. With that bike I did not feel like I had much room for error when the stuff got techno-ugly. Not the case with the Ripmo at all. Nearly point and shoot in comparison. I have not yet completed the “mind meld” with “Big Mo” but this bike is already a hoot when pointed down.
Clearly I need more play time!
Arizona Trail Video
If you are going to go all the way to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to camp and ride the Rainbow Rim trail, it is well worth it to add a segment or two of the Arizona Trail that runs through the area into the mix. This is from an 18 mile snippet of the trail south of Jacob Lake. We did this on Day 11 of August MTB Vacation.