top of Hobbit Forest: Ray, Rick, Alex, Al, James, Jason, Byron, Kevin

oh you know it was big when I’m busting out Roman numerals. biggest Rancho yet! Its now officially a 3-day event, and the ease with which it has become such testifies to what an awesome diverse riding spot Arizona is. It could be 4, 5, 10 days with us never going more than an hour from Alex’s pad in Williams.   My stop en route to ride Granite Basin last year provided the motivation for me, Alex, Byron and James to again tap Helimech for some Prescott action on the new technical Dells trails. He hooked us up with his friend Chris, a city employee who built the trail system, Zack, and mtbr friend Enel.   Our 6am meet time in East BF Mesa was quickly forgotten once we hit the dirt at 8:45 and got a taste for Arizona’s version of Gooseberry Mesa.

I see a riding and kayaking day in the future

Chris and Enel   invented most of the lines on this route, and the experts were happy to show them to us.   Grins abounded.   Trials were hit, rocks were dropped, rocks were crawled, we got our rock monkeys off!

and then we saw the Sheriff.   who had gotten an emergency beacon call from James’ Spot unit.   WTF? no seriously? what the fucking fuck?   the thing is closed and buried in his pack and his father in Flagstaff gets an emergency email and SAR is dispatched!   Ironic, as the week prior my neighbor across the street died of a heart attack while hiking Flatiron, and wasn’t found til 5 days later just 200 yards from the parking lot.   A Spot unit might be on the Xmas list.   We passed my neighbor’s widow grimly walking her dog as we drove out early that morning.   Everyone sincerely thanked the Deputy for his time.

James and I took the Prescott boys out to Indian buffet, which managed to kill any hope of an afternoon ride on Spruce Mtn or Granite Basin, as well as anything left alive in the car for the ride up to Williams. I thought the Indians were pacifists? We got to Rancho with plenty of daylight left to enjoy a new 9 hole disc golf course Alex and Ray drew up around Alex’s place.

Disc golf, generally speaking, bores me. The best course in the Valley is 2 blocks from my office, and I have yet to play it since we’ve moved in. I’ll occasionally play and drink some beers and have fun walking around on a beautiful afternoon, but fundamentally, disc golf bores the shit out of me just like ball golf. Loooooong uncontested drives with discs you can’t catch, long undramatic approach shots with discs you can’t catch, and awkward stationary putts into stationary baskets that can’t catch. What good is a disc if you can’t have a throw? What good is a receiver if they hold their arms at their sides and only catch with their teeth? I can put a disc into a 4x4x4 box any which way from 50 yards out, with a mark on me and D on my receiver, but from 5 yards away my putts bounce off the baskets’ chains over and over and over. The word disc being involved only aggravates how unlike Ultimate it actually is.

I had never before played a course designed by Ultimate players, and Alex’s course was the most fun I’ve ever had. The holes were about the length of a field, and the shots required more touch and judgment than power.   Breaks in the tree lines were lanes through the defense, shots over the roof were zone-breakers, the wood piles and furniture required throws to areas away from defenders.   And best of all, you just had to hit the target – discs are meant to fly into things, not limp up to them.

no-limit heckling

After a lackadaisical warm up round, I couldn’t help being disgusted by my sloppy throws, despite not having picked up a disc in about a year and allegedly not caring about Ultimate any more. Al, Byron and I threw while Alex freshened up our drinks, and within about 10 throws I could see my rhythm coming back as I started drilling the guys in the chest from 20 yards. Al and Byron’s throws got tighter too. You could just feel it…the buzz the discs were making coming in – the game was on!

My boredom with golf is usually why I lose focus, and suck, and enjoy it even less.     But these holes were a challenge, the competition exciting, and i found a focus i thought I was too drunk to hold on to.   I nailed the tire from 15 yards out to go 3 under after 3 holes.   Alex held a 1-stroke lead, Byron and Kevin were close behind, and Al hit a hole-in-one to get back into the pack.

can you believe this drive?   The hole is the tree right in front of the bridge.   Its hard work getting a 1-under.

#5 was an easy putt.   Kevin put it in the house just for style points

James was a good sport about being completely and totally out of his element, and we didn’t even make him fetch beers.

Us: I’ve been playing Ultimate for about 20 years
James: I tossed a disc around at a Phish concert once

he really did get his disc caught in a tree.

Dinner and drinks followed before I passed out.

Saturday the route was up Schultz->Little Gnarly->down Pickle->up the road to Red Onion->up Hobbit Forest->down Wasabi->down Rocky Ridge.   The sky was beautiful in all directions, except for a huge thundercloud hanging right over Mt. Elden.   We got lightly rained on for the hour-long climb to the Pickle TH.

The effort of the climb seemed harder wondering if our day would be cut short, or if we’d have to reroute.   Pickle is a double-black that none of us had ridden, and none of us wanted to encounter during a storm.   The rain misted but mostly let up, but Pickle’s steep quarter-mile opening climb gave us no comfort.   Once again, everyone looked at me and wondered where the fuck exactly I was leading them?   Pickle then became an extremely steep series of off-camber switchbacks and runouts, with 3 hard slots mixed in.   The first slot was a sharp   right turn off a boulder into a small chute that fell away down a drainage.   First try I got the turn, but got sucked into the drainage and layed down in the dirt.   Second time was much smoother, which gave me the confidence to dive into slot #2 – a long, steep set of teeth that bounced me round and had me in a short nose-wheelie.   I got through it, but decided to save #3 for another day.   It was steeper and denser with rocks, but seemed shorter and smoother and therefore easier than #2.   I really regret not hitting it, but it was the smart thing to do after getting shaken around on #2.

A mile of slow crawling back up Elden Lookout Rd led to a mile of slow but very soothing climbing up Red Onion, then a mile of boulders and hike-a-bike up Hobbit Forest.

We split up here, Alex and I opting for Wasabi while the other guys headed back the way we came up to meet us at the start of the descent down Rocky Ridge.   I have only ridden Wasabi once 2 yrs ago, and at the time it was probably the hardest thing I’d done.   The differences were remarkable this time.   There were still 2 near-vertical rock trials I could not get, but everything else was right in my comfort zone.   The rock trials and steep s-curves were just crazy fun.   The exit from Upper Wasabi is a 10-ft nearly vertical crack down a rockface.   Alex made it look easy.   I tried 4 times, nearly killed myself but managed to bail and suffer only a sprained thumb.   I was so rattled that I couldn’t subsequently even get the easier exit banking off the boulder that I got 2 years ago.

I got some redemption on the jumps on Lower Wasabi.   The sessions out at NRA paid huge dividends.   Once I nutted up and hit the first jump, they were smooth like butter.

Alex drew off my confidence, and had a good run down the jumps too.   The two of us have a great codependency going on – he’s a bit sharper on the rockfaces, me a bit better in the jumps and chunks, and we manage to bring out the best in each other.

I’m trying to not dwell on the stuff I couldn’t get, and it was very cool handling 90% of Wasabi with ease. The vertical faces are my ceiling right now, but the steepness of Pickle and Wasabi made me feel like I was easing into that skill and making some progress. Flag seems just enough less-rocky and jagged than some of the slots on Viejo or Holbert on Somo that I think riding it will help give me a little technique and courage to make the next step forward. The big boulders I could roll were easier than ever, I don’t feel out of sorts anymore getting back over the seat and letting the bike do the work on the 3, 4 and 5 footers.

All this rattled around in my mind while I was still pumping adrenaline from my fall and then the jumps. I turned briefly onto Lower Oldham where it parallels Elden road back down to our meetup with the other guys.   Its extremely chunky, but not very steep, and its challenges hardly registered and I plunged through it all.   Rocky Ridge was more of the same, I took the lead with Al on his new Yeti 575 right on my tail for the 2.5 miles of intermediate rocks back to the cars.

Back at Rancho, we got down to business.   Being the guy with access to excellent cheap tequila led to my vertical integration: supplier, distributor, and peer pressurer.   Ray did one better, bringing some fresh yellow-tail and bluefin he caught on a recent fishing trip.   Tequila and shashimi – perfect!

a skunk came by to scarf on all the scraps left on Alex’s porch.   We huddled inside, afraid to go out and shoo it away.   This pic was taken through a glass door.   The next day, I looked in my cooler and found a peach left there had been half-eaten, and a bagel in a plastic bag had gone missing.

Sunday we voted to go back to Elden.   Up Schultz->Onceler->Overlook->Secret->Supermoto.   Not as gnar as the day before, but plenty of log trials and chunk to keep things interesting.

While we waited at the top of Schultz, Sam and Jrock spun up, repeating much of the route we did yesterday.   We then heard that somehow Byron had trashed his deraileur and hanger on a random rock, and turned back with Rick for the cars.   The 6 of us remaining turned uphill to finish our hour-long climb.

Overlook

I knew it was going to be a good day when I got the rock trial right past the overlook on my first try, compared to 5 shots on it last year.   Everything just flowed from there.

Coming down Overlook, I was charging through the chunk about the best I’ve ever done.   Seeing the lines, moving my body and bike over them, and jumping adding the 3rd dimension to the lines I could choose.   One turn I popped off a large flat rock completely over and around the crud in the turn, holding my speed and my flow like the rocks were never there.   Onward to Secret, I came to a tight pile sure to grab your deraileur if you tried to go between the rocks, and instead went up onto the largest rock.   When it became too narrow, I dropped off it and over the remainder of the pile and never lost a stroke.   .   The rest of Secret and Supermoto flew by, nothing phased me, probably one of the tightest days on the bike I’ve ever had.   Great end to a great weekend.