Sunday, 03 August 2014
Only Root and I were open for a trail ride on Sunday, so we headed out to Sunset Hills to take advantage of the good weather. The ride started out somewhat normally, climbing up to the agricultural facility, dropping down to Lilikoi Junction, then climbing up to the plateau to drop Deadwood to the bunker. Then things got a little convoluted.
We climbed up the little spur road to the end of Secret and bumped into Shiloh at the top. We had intended to go counterclockwise and drop down Hula Girl, but after traversing the edge of the plateau for some time, we ended up running into Shiloh again at the top of Deadwood. Apparently, we had done a complete circuit of the plateau. Even “knowing” where we were now, we still didn’t find Hula Girl, and ended up coming down the easy switchback climb near Monarch.
We returned to Lilikoi Junction, but since we still had some energy left, we went back out in search of the double-black loose step-downs. I was mistaken in thinking they were out by the fallen tree, but it was actually the start of the lower half of Monarch. We dropped into the trail near the fallen tree and ended up retracing our previous tracks to the bunker. We climbed back out and dropped lower Monarch. As usual, the drops were fun, but the long uphill was unfun. Surprisingly, the sortie along Jungle wasn’t as mucky as I thought it would be. Most of the mess was from the strawberry guavas. The ride wasn’t quite a deathmarch, but at the end, we were fully depleted.
D = 20.9 km. Vavr = 8.0 km/h, Vmax = 30.6 km/h, T = 2-hours, 35-minutes (total trail time about five and a half hours), A/D = 695 m
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