~ Bruneau ~

On Saturday, Josh and I drove out to Bruneau with our mountain bikes. We forgot sunscreen, developed sunburns, and, despite no lack of effort on our part, failed to locate any good mountain biking trails. I may have come off as a little cranky, yet I did have a lot of fun. When we got to Bruneau, we were struck by how unhelpful the rangers were in directing us to some trails. The first thing that we did was to climb the tallest dune.

This was quite challenging. We both wore inappropriate footwear for hiking up a dune and quickly removed said footwear (which tends to be the norm, I believe). It was steep and sandy. I found that it was easier to hike up backwards. Once at the top, we admired the view, ran up and down the edge of ridge, and caused some sand avalanches onto unsuspecting insects. For the descent, we located the steepest portion of the dune and ran down it. This was quite an exiliarating experience. With one leg rotation, we decended a surprising length of dune, and once we started to run we could not stop, the possibility of falling proving more thrill than fear.

And that was that. We located some sunscreen at a visitor's center up the road (but the damage had already been done) and drove down to the edge of the Snake River to locate a wicked mountain biking trail. We unloaded the bikes, changed into our spandex and protective gear, and headed down some kind of restricted sportsman's access road. I became quickly cranky after seeing the dead body of a snake, which indicated to me that we might be venturing into snake territory, and after being somewhat-severely scratched, cut, and poked by these massive bushes with thorns growing all over the road. Incidentally, today my cut legs are all swollen and I have multiple thorn splinters in my legs and hands. Another thing that was making me cranky, was that the sportsman's access road we were riding on was anything but a wicked mountain biking trail. Eventually, we turned around and rode down the highway in search of another possible wicked trail. We located another sportsman's access road which seemed to travel parallel to the River and rode it for a time. This was much better, no fear of snakes and no thorny bushes, but we came to a dead end. Again, we turned around in search of the elusive wicked mountain biking trail. This time we headed towards the horse park of Bruneau and, being careful not to surprise any of the horses, rode down an overgrown road. This area was carpetted with very dead versions of the thorny bushes and I felt some satisfaction crunching over them with my tires without being cut. A persistent difficulty, was that the dead thorny bushes branches kept getting lodged in my spokes and it was kind of annoying. Soon the road became unridable because there were simply too many thorny bush corpses to ride a bike through, and I came up with the brilliant idea of "Hey, why do we need a trail? Let's just ride this way" and by "this way" I indicated towards a space with less thorny bushes, no trail, and lots of sand. It proved really brilliant, my idea, except, you know, the opposite of that and eventually we turned around for the final time and rode back to the car.

In sum, Bruneau is not an area to find wicked mountain biking trails.

Posted by jennifer at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)