Crashed and Burned

Back on Wednesday, I blow outta work at 1pm for a little red rock mountain bike throw down in Sedona. Wilkens rolls down from Flag and we are on the trail by 1:15pm. A quick warm up through the Uptown Sedona yields rubber tomahawk, fudge, Indian jewelry displays and timeshare hawkers…….we blew past and got ourselves to Schnebly Hill Road and on to the Munds Wagon Trail. Every time I ride this trail somebody has to remark “there’s no f*ckin’ way you could bring a wagon up or down this thing”….sure – say that now because it’s been about 100 freakin’ years since the trail was used for Wagons, it’s been rebuilt with slickrock staircases, and I would venture to guess that only a portion of it WAS used in the first place.

Regardless, it’s a hard hike/a/bike warm up climb with some steep ups and downs that are supposed to get you on your game for phase 2: The Cowpies….Dome shaped piles of slickrock make up the Cowpies….it’s a blast to ride. Up, down, all around, ledges, sand, cactus, more ledges until you come to phase 3: The Damifino trail….. Big Steve has hiked the first part of this, and would probably echo my appreciation for the scenery, and the brilliance of the red rocks against the horizon of blue sky, and the technical aspects of riding this stuff. Trackstands are required from time to time so you can re-adjust your line, jumping ½ way through switchbacks, rolling over boulders, and off-camber red rock chutes that test your tires and your mind.

So Wilkens and I blow through this section with a few chicken shit dabs, but nothing too lame. We head down Damifino, and I’m riding ahead of him by maybe 50 yards. I got hung up on a climb, clipped out, but fell left instead of right – off a 10 foot ledge and onto a slope of scree and slickrock chunks…thankfully no cactus. About a second after I stopped sliding, my bike lands on my legs – nice. Wilkens comes by and hears my call “Dude…a little help here”. It takes me a few minutes to climb back up because my legs went all Elvis on me and started shaking and trembling. Net result: Broken brake lever, broken cable holder on my fork, rash all over, a nice hip contusion, and it turns out I have a sprain in my left wrist. Nothing too earth shattering and I can still ride without too much pain – so we continue on. The technicality of this trail gets harder as you go down, and a few of the downhill switchbacks were bike/hike as I just didn’t have the stones to roll them out. My head was all scrambled after the crash and the conservative side of me was evident.

We finished the descent at Oak Creek, crossed in knee deep ice water that – once you were out – felt pretty good. A tougher than remembered climb back to the car had me gassed, but fortunately it put a bow on a crash and burn day.