Good, Bad, Ugly and Wrong

Adventure Location: Elephant Butte State Park, South Monticello Unit, New Mexico
Teams Location:  Elephant Butte State Park, South Monticello Unit, New Mexico

This morning’s bicycle ride brought out all the types of roads. The OFM Biking Team started out from the campground shade shelter on packed gravel.  That was not too bad for the short distance to the paved road. Then as we left the campground loop the hike and bike trail loomed up. 

OK a special path just for us.

Well the gravel on the path was moderately packed sometimes.  The riding was chancy at best.  We stuck with it all the way out to the main road Lakeside Drive.  When the path got close to the road we bailed from the path and onto the road.  The good paving really was nice to ride upon.  The hills gave us a chance to do some good workout. This surface was labeled THE GOOD.

Another road we tried our luck riding was well packed gravel and larger stones. This style of road surface caused a major slowdown in speed but actually road decently well if one is very carefully. This surface was labeled THE BAD.

Another road we tried for a very short distance was a graded rock and sand road to who know where.  A vehicle came out of the road and we decided to try it.  After three slips and slides on the loose or deep sand it was time to walk SightSeer back out to the main road. This surface was labeled THE UGLY.

Of course we had to try our luck on another road near the campground.  It went from a plateau down a steep hill with large loose rocks scattered all over the place and at the bottom was the soft silty mud of the lakeshore.  SightSeer was pointed down the slope and that was the end of that. SS would not go down the slope.  It just stopped at the top of the road and shook its front wheel back and forth NO NO NO !  At least SS let me take a picture of where it refused to ride. Can you see the front wheel moving back and forth?  Maybe SS had more sense than the OFM. We labeled this road WRONG.

After this last picture we just rode around on the GOOD road until we had gone up and down the hills long enough to use up the bottle of water SS was carrying. Then we headed back to the Castle to rest up from this session of trying to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM.