Ditch

Rode Maunawili Ditch trail on Saturday morning.  There was a fairly large crew: Jeff, Sara, Root, Ckucke, Danny, Ryan Higa, and myself.  Yes, Ryan is back in town!  He got in sometime around when we were up in Whistler.  I talked to him a bit, but didn’t get to ask him if this was a permanent situation or not. 

We rode up the road and turned right down Ditch.  The climb up was a burner, especially off the start cold, but after Whistler, I couldn’t really complain.  The Ditch trail was dry and fast.  I hadn’t been there in several years, and it hadn’t changed much while I was away.  We turned up a ridge trail that we had been on before that climbed up one of the fingers that the trail snakes around.  The singletrack was a lot more settled in than I remembered, assumedly from use – it was newly-cut way back when.

Somebody has been really busy up there.  A lot of the understory has been cleared out in places, and some nice features exposed.  Before, it was primarily a singletrack with no options.  There were some nice rock face roll-ins, and some rock drops.  There was also a rickety bridge, but no crazy North Shore stunts.   On the way down, we ran into Kenny and Nancy from “the old days” and their crew.  Seems like all the old riders are getting back on the bikes… We connected back to the main trail around the Formosa Koa trees and rode all the way to the end where you can either continue down to the street or turn up to the ranch gate.  Backtracking up the parallel trail, we returned toward the road.  Sara and Danny continued on the main trail while the rest of us backtracked the upper trail.  Again, the climb up was not easy, but not that bad, since I had a newfound definition of the word “heinous”.

At the road, we decided to climb up and search for a new side loop that Jeff had heard about.  It was sweltering hot and people had places to go, but we figured it would be worth a look.  Climbing up to the big mango tree, we found the drop-in.  It led to an old contour road, possibly from the irrigation ditch years.  We rode along it mauka until it faded just past a ridgeline junction with a downhill trail.  The downhill trail was well-used, so we went down that until it junctioned another countour road, this one wider and with an actual remmnant of an irrigation ditch beside it.  Both roads deserved further exploration, but time was short, so we headed back toward the road on the most obvious, well-used path and came out on the road just below the Ditch trail junction.

Lunch was at “The Food Company” or something to that effect in Keolu.  I had the meat loaf with brown rice and tossed salad for $7.  The meat loaf and gravy were good – the salad wasn’t anything to write home about.  B overall. 

Pictures here 

D = 7.01-miles, Vavr = 6.1 mph, Vmax = 21.5 mph, T = 1-hour, 8-minutes