Recovery Ride

Well Howie decided that we should take it easy today, seeing as how we had ridden the previous five days and the last two rides were quite strenuous. After considering a few 9 or 10 mile routes, he settled on a 22 miler with an initial climb of 2500 feet, but "it is an easy grade." I was feeling good so I wasn't gonna argue, i was pretty sure I could handle it without too much of an issue. So we headed east in The Beast to the Little south fork of the provo river. The first five miles were on paved road, and if you have to ride pavement, this is the road to ride. It had a nice grade, hardly even noticed we gained 700 feet over the five miles, had a nice wide berm without alot of garbage on it, and the scenery up the canyon was great. Note to self, when you see gates that can close the road in the winter, you can assume that you are going to go UP. Anyways, we turned off on Mill Canyon road and took that another two miles, gravel this time but still not a bad grade, and beautiful scenery again. So the first 7 miles and 1200 feet took about an hour. Not exactly the start to a recovery ride, but what the heck. We turned onto another forest service "road" which was more of a beat double track that would take every inch of clearance the Big Tire Jeep has to get up it. But the bikes obviously had no problem and the grade wasnt too bad. Another 5 miles and 1300 feet later, we got to the single track heading down. The last bit across the top of the mountain had some spectacular views and it felt like we were on top of the world. It was the first time this trip we got over 9000 feet, actually topped out about 9700. After some pictures and bite to eat, we started down the 10 miles of downhill (with a slight up hill interruption close to the end) less than a mile into it we came out into a meadow and surprised a couple of elk that quickly took off. We then ran into about 100 head of cattle free range grazing, more than few less than happy to see us. There was a short steep section down towards the river tributary and we basically followed that the rest of the way down. It was definitely a great downhill, really nice track, although we did encounter our first bit of dusty trail. There were a number of meadows as well as stream crossings on the way down. After about 4.5 hours and 22 miles, including picture taking time, we were back at the Beast and decided this was definitely more than just a recovery ride.
It was only about 20 minutes back to the camper so that wasnt too bad. We got everything out of the Beast and quickly started dinner as we were both starved. We also started getting things moved out of the garage area into other parts of the trailer as Howie's son, nephew and brother in law are arriving for a week's stay tomorrow. Dinner was excellent as usual, bbq chicken, salad and more of howie's potato wedges.