|   RR: Tour of the White Mountains preride | Paul B
Sep 10, 2001 8:02 AM | | Spent the weekend preriding the Tour of the White Mountains "long race" in Pinetop, AZ. For anyone who's interested in this race and has never done it before, here's what I can tell you:
* It is a damned long trail. I broke up the 63 mile course into two days, camping halfway around at Pierce Spring. Frankly, I'm not sure if breaking it up is much easier than just riding the whole thing. I guess I'll find out October 6!
* It's about 50% singletrack, 50% forest road. Some of the roads are well maintained, and some are not. Rednecks loooove muddin' out there. Lesson: Just because the map says it's a road doesn't mean it'll be easy going.
* The first singletrack segment is wonderful. After starting out on about six miles of forest road and old railbed, you jump on the Blue Ridge and Springs trails. Very nice, mellow warmup climb, terrific singletrack descent. Quite bumpy, actually -- there's not a whole lot of buttah-smooth track in the area. Bring a little suspension!
* After Blue Ridge/Springs, took the connector over to Los Burros, where I rode about halfway around this *wonderful* trail to the camp site.
* Side note: I dusted my sag wagon by about half an hour. We had a designated location and my best guesstimate as to when I'd be there, and got there like an hour ahead of time. Sort of threw my rhythm to sit around cooling down while my water showed up, but I felt really good about keeping up such a strong pace.
* So, camping. Screaming kids didn't help the wind-down, but whatever. Hot grub, beer, pie and I was ready to sleep. This weekend it got COLD up there, like below 40F. I was sort of prepared, but I never got snuggly and sleepy. Sort of dozed all night and watched the stars. I guess there are worse ways to spend the evening.
* Second day turns out to be the harder of the two days. More climbing, more rocky/treacherous descents. What sadistic bastards built a course that gets HARDER at the back end? Someone's going to break a bone on race day -- I'm not kidding.
The trail starts out finishing Los Burros, then picking up the Four Springs connector (which I've never ridden before) over to the Land of the Pioneers trail. Four Springs was niiice and quite isolated; it's also behind a series of gates, which keeps out the quads and motorcycles. The trail is some of the best I had a chance to ride.
* Land of the Pioneers is the big finale. It's north of the rest of the loop, and it's quite volcanic/basaltic. Little round lava balls on hardpack = little ball bearings on pavement. Makes the climbs crazy hard and the descents quite tricky. I broke two spokes on this part. Oh! And, keeping in character with the rest of the course, this loop ends with a mile-long climb up a ball-bearing-laden slope and an ultra-treacherous descent down an ass-off-the-back-of-the seat descent (covered in the same ball bearings).
* The ride ends by following about 11 miles of forest road (again, not all in terrific shape) out of the forest and back to HQ. Dang! Luckily it's largely downhill, and you can hammer out in the big ring if you've got the juice for it. Me, I was scrubbing off gears as fast as I could every time I hit an incline of more than 1%.
So...it's a big, big ride. It's one big loop, not multiple laps. It's a terrific intro to the White Mountains. Man is my ass sore!
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