Last Regular Group Ride of 2025 Los Burros

Saturday Ride: Hey Everyone! Well, it has been a great summer and fall and with the holidays closing in on us all, it is probably time to wrap or the "official" riding season this year. And to close it out with a bang, the last ride of the year will be at Los Burros on Saturday morning, Meet at 8:00 a.m. at trailhead #2 (not the campground) for an approximate 14 mile ride. The weather is still holding and the trail should be in good shape. Hopefully, the control burn smoke won't be as bad there as it was here in Show Low and Pinetop-Lakeside this morning.

Conditions were perfect for last weekend's group ride in the Buena Vista! Expect a repeat of similar weather this Saturday.

Los Burros is an intermediate level MTB ride, so bring that skill-set along. As usual, we are setting a steady but social pace and we'll keep our group together. See you Saturday morning!

Trailwork Update: TRACKS has continued working on the Buena Vista trail around BV4-BV7 this last week. If you have an opportunity, check out their work on the "Man Enough" Strava segment. The hill is an especially difficult section of trail due to the incline and rockiness, but they have it riding pretty darn good and have addressed a lot of the erosion problems! TRACKS will be out there working again next Monday, starting at 8:00 a.m. I think we are going to try to remove a couple of those sand traps that are out there on the trail that are pretty dangerous for bikes. If you are able, come out and help on Monday!

Rut Repairs: Remember when the remnants of Hurricane Priscilla came through a few weeks ago and we got three inches of rain in three days? Well . . . we had a few mountain bikers who thought it would be a great idea to go mountain biking either right after or during the storm when the soil was roughly the consistency of a bowl of Jell-O. The result? Some pretty massive ruts in a couple of trails, especially lower Flintstone and lower Man Enough. Well, it has taken about ten hours of labor to address those, and there really is no fixing it completely. Once ruts in the trail dry up, they pretty much set up like concrete. And they are darned difficult to repair at that point.

Those spots are looking better now and the trail-rehab as been sped along.

Ruts on lower Flintstone before the repair.

The same section of trail, post-repair.

All of that said, please tell anyone who even thinks of going out there when it is that wet that unless they are prepared to go out and fix the damage they cause, DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. Whether they are on bike, horse or on foot, we can't be using the trails when they are wet. It is really discourteous to other trail users. Ruts like this are dangerous because they can grab a bike's wheel that gets stuck in one and pull the rider off the trail. It speeds up erosion by cutting in tracks the water can get stuck in during a rain causing water to flow down the trail rather than to roll off of it. It makes the trails choppy and not so fun to ride (especially horse tracks in a trail). It causes needless hours of work and maintenance to be done on the trail that was completely unnecessary.

I am certain that anyone reading this probably knows better than to do these kinds of things, but if you hear of anyone doing this, please educate them about the problems they are causing out there.