The Very Large Array wasn’t on too many CDT riders radar but was close enough that I added it to our trajectory (Radio joke, get it). Neither of us felt strongly enough about going into the tourist center to spend $8.00 so away we rode after snapping some cool shots.
Meagen is a gal in our office and it was her birthday so when you are are riding through the desert and spot a Happy Birthday balloon drifting in the sage brush you don’t let the opportunity slip by. Posted this to her Facebook page when I had cell service the next day.
It was at this point the regularly scheduled riding got a little sketchy. The route had us bumping into ranch gates, old forest roads that looked like they hadn’t been used in years, road markers laying on the ground, riverbed roads and finally a pissy ranch couple who turned us around only a quarter mile from the main road. That one put a burr in Don’s blanket that took hours to work through. The whole fiasco cost us about three hours and had us riding into the night to set up camp after dark.
Pretty good campsite considering we had no idea what it looked like until the next morning.
The Santa Rita Copper Mine, I’m pretty sure you can see this sucker from space!
We checked into a decent motel that night so we could purchase one day of Mexican auto insurance online. The last day of riding the actual divide route started with us donating our bear spray to a local bike shop because no pepper spray is allowed when crossing the border. The owner would pass them along to some CDT bicyclists running from south to north.
A slight miscalculation routing led us to a very nice lady rancher who pointed us back into the right direction. In doing so we ran across this dude who patiently waited us out before relocating him off the road.
This little guy got all uppity when Don started poking at him. I'm not much into spiders but big furry ones are kinda cool.
Flowers growing out of a cattle guard, how can you not stop for a photo of that?
Locust? These critters were all over the road and big enough to see and avoid, most of the time. Glad there weren't flying because it would have left bruises!
The underpass on Hwy 10 is kind of a big landmark on this ride. From here south there is nothing but the town of Hachita until the border. Hachita was a town at one time but not anymore, no service of any kind. Some quick roadside math said we had to run into Lordsburg on Hwy 10 before continuing on into Mexico.
Just on the other side of the underpass is a tourist trap where Don had hoped to score a continental divide ride t-shirt. No joy for him or this guy.
I don’t even remember a hump in the road near this divide marker.
I was a little nervous for the border crossing at Antelope Wells. I rolled up to the US side and proceeded to roll through since no one was there? Don comes on the communicator just as I hear whistles telling me to turn around. I was going out the in door to the country and they don’t like when that happens. The border agents joked seriously about prison if I’d continued on.
Talk about night and day at the border! U.S. side, pavement, modern construction and professional. Mexico, old wooden buildings, some dude in civies, dirt road and chickens. The Mexican border jefe just gave us a bored wave after telling him our destination. We kinda figured out where we where supposed to go through the road construction in progress and headed for Mexico Hwy 2. Rob’s borrowed GPS did not have Mexico maps loaded so when the magic purple line veered off onto a closed road as soon as we crossed the border I knew we’d be improvising.
We crossed over from Chihuahua to Sonora where we would leave Mexico at Agua Prieta into Douglas, AZ. We had a super nice ride over a mountain pass and quickly learned if the guy in front of you signals left it’s clear to pass, no matter the type of line down the middle of the road. Miles of construction detours onto parallel dirt roads made it even better passing trucks and cars over the whooped out bypasses.
The Mexican military had a checkpoint set up about a mile out from Agua Prieta and while a little nerve wracking with the number of guys, guns and gates it was another bored wave-off from three guys this time leaning against a barrier after hearing our route.
The crossing back into the states was lines of cars lined up three to four deep and hot. The agent thought the ride we’d been on sounded cool but I wasn’t real chatty after chosing the wrong line, getting hot and bothered as Don motors on two lanes over. In Douglas we gassed up, pounded a big Gatorade and hit the road to move some air. We saw quite a few US Border Patrol on our way to Tombstone and turned off just before a fixed checkpoint probably 20 miles inside the border. As we rolled into Tombstone the sky grew dark and we geared up for rain for the last few miles of our wonderful trip.
It poured as we entered town but felt pretty darn good with the heat.
Every time I turned on Rob’s GPS I was greeted with a photo of his family from years ago. “Hello Rob’s family” was the greeting each morning so whether he knows it or not he, and his family, finished the ride with us.
We had to get up to Phoenix today to meet Don’s brother Tom for our shuttle ride home. We knew it was going to be brutally hot and tried to get an early start only to discover I had a front flat turning out of the motel. Broke it down next to a convenience store under the shade of a small tree and never found a hole in the tube? Put it all back together with a new valve core and motored on after sweating out about a quart of liquids. We did stop long enough to buy Don a set of garden gloves since he lost one earlier the prior day. Just prior to that stop I got stung by something big under my left arm but I’m pretty sure I ended it’s miserable life with a few frantic whacks.
We did stop early in the day to do a little cactus photo shoot but once that was done it was all business getting to Buckeye just west of Phoenix.
Look up hot in the dictionary and you see a picture of this.
Even as hot as it was I still had to get some shots of these sculptures for my eldest daughter Ashley. She’s a biologist but has had a thing for T-Rex since she was a little girl.
So we rolled into our final riding destination of the trip with the ambient temperature at 105 F/40.5 C. Our hero Tom had cranked the AC in the rooms to max and had a few ice cold beers ready for consumption! Somehow I scored the private room that night and man did I enjoy sleeping without ear plugs that night. The next morning we got a very early start for the long run home driving in shifts. I rolled into my driveway about 8:30 that evening after over 15 hours on the road but very happy to be home.
I'll post up some afterthoughts from the ride including if I did it again what would be different and gear choices. If you have made it this far thanks for reading and letting me share our little adventure.
Our next scheduled big ride will be the circumnavigation of Baja in 2018 with as little pavement as possible.
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