More Blood on the Trail

Spencer called me up last night and asked what I was going to be doing around 4:30 this morning. It was clear that he was itching for a ride. Apparently an old friend from Utah (Cort) was visiting Spencer and had brought his bike down. So we made plans to head over to Mesa and ride Hawes.

We hit the trailhead by the power plant at 5:30 and rode the Pig Trail to Hawes to Saddleback to Mine. At the bottom of the Mine Trail we chatted for a few minutes and then clicked in again to ride over to the Ridge Trail and back to the car. Other than being a little out of shape Cort did fairly well. He opted to hop off and walk down a few sections of trail. Unfortunately, after our little break there was a section he was wishing he had walked down.

There is a spot on the trail where you have to take a hard right and drop down over some rather sharp rocks. Cort was a little off balance coming into the turn and went over the handlebars. Spencer and I didn't see it as we were ahead, but we heard him yelling and went back to see what was up. This was the site that greeted us:

Cort managed to hit one of the rocks with his face hard enough to dislodge it (the rock not his face). Once he cleaned up the blood we could see he had two pretty serious cuts that may need stitches and some abrasions on his cheek. Cort seemed more concerned about his teeth than his face. He impacted the rock pretty hard and though none of his teeth were loose I guess he could still lose some.

Spencer and I felt pretty bad for dragging Cort out on the trail and then getting his face all busted up. But he was good-natured about it and even managed to smile when Spencer snapped the photo. Hopefully this won’t put a damper on his future mountain biking excursions. He was worried about what his wife would think. I have to say that if I came home looking like that my wife would want to put the brakes on my riding.

Hope you recover soon Cort.

Independence Day Ride

This morning I rolled out of bed at 4 a.m. so I could head down to South Mountain with Mike and Spencer for an early morning ride. We parked at 46th Street and took the Beverly Canyon Trail over to the Pima Canyon parking lot and the trailhead for the National Trail and Mormon Loop. We rode up Mormon Loop and then hooked up with National. We continued West along National to the Buena Vista lookout point. Then we bombed 2 miles down Geronimo which dumped us out on to 21st Street. We finished up with a few miles of pavement back to the van.


Mike was the cursed rider today as he suffered both injury and flat. Coming down a switchback section of National just East of the Buena Vista Lookout he smacked a rock with his right leg. We stopped at the lookout for him to bandage up. I didn't even think to pull out the camera until he was already bandaged up.