Ridin'Ard

Miles Tuesday: 197 

Hours in the saddle: 10:57??

Tuesday was our last big riding day. We went in to the Santa Fe National Forest thru Los Alamos towards the Gilman Tunnels. They appear in several Western movies and Julie just has a serious fetish for them tbh. 

The gods of GPS and google kept routing us through Los Alamos National Labs, a large guard gate complex. We tried turning around twice, but all roads led to Los Alamos. We approached the gate and explained that we were just trying to go straight on the state highway. The guard let is through and it wasn’t a big deal. There wasn’t even a gate on the other end, making the other gate pretty pointless, and making us wonder how an inspection point can be placed along a state highway with no alternate route. 

The route we took is the same route of Julie’s infamous Nightmare Ride down the Mountain 8 years ago, the first year I’d been riding. It was much nicer this time, in the daylight. 

So we turned off on to an increasingly crappy and narrow road towards the Gilman Tunnels. It even had a center stripe when it was clearly a one lane road. 

Now compare it to this picture from 8 years ago. 

Rough, rough scenery. 

This was a really pretty mountain on our way back. 

Aaand here are some super-red rocks in Jemez Pueblo, where we stopped for gas. 

Next we went to the Sandia Crest. We thought it would be cool to loop around and then go down to Albuquerque, so we stopped in a small town on the way to the upper part of the loop to get lunch. Literally as we were taking our helmets off, a guy in a big Toyota Tundra with off-road suspension and tires asked if we were going to the Sandia Crest. We said yes, and he said that the road was so rough with pot holes 1.5 ft across that he couldn‘t get his truck up there, but that we would love it on our bikes. We nodded and went inside to look at the route more closely on google maps. Yeah…not interested in doing that on an incline. We’re still new at this type of riding. So we ended up going thru ABQ to go up there and back, and not doing the loop.

The Sandia Crest was actually the first place that we tried to go at the beginning of the trip, when everything was closed due to fires or potential fires. It was a super twisty ride up a vertical mile (5000 feet in elevation) to 10k+ feet in the space of less than 20 miles. At least this time we had fuel injection. 

There were a bunch of cell towers, but surprisingly little cell service. 

We were warned that the restaurant at the top of the crest was closed. That really bummed me out, but t was good to know ahead of time so that we weren’t relying on being able to eat there. 

Then it was back to Albuquerque for our last night. 

Wednesday we rode a whole 1.5 miles to the Triumph dealership to drop the bikes off, pack our stuff back in our airplane luggage, get lunch with Edie (Pat’s cousin), and go to the airport for a late afternoon flight.