Cloudland Canyon (Again)

I'd had a satisfying time at Cloudland Canyon that one weekend, but it had been really cold, I'd also had to cut it a little short to get home in time for whatever, and as a result, really didn't ride everything that I had wanted to up there. So, the next weekend, I got up earlier, and didn't have the same trouble navigating out there. It was also a good bit warmer, so I figured I'd have a better time overall.

This time, I parked in the Ascalon Road Lot and just planned to ride all of the trails to the south.

This worked out well. I ripped south/west to the Cloudland Canyon "Backcountry" Lot...

...made a quick trip through the local privy...

...and immediately got to shredding the rest of the system.

There's a loop at the far end called Pathkiller, and a spur off of it that led back to the CCT called Prince Albert. There's another Prince Albert Section north/east of that. These trails were all pretty similar to the CCT in difficulty. Then there were Atlatl and Barkeater as I continued on. Both marginally more difficult than the CCT.

Hanging off of Barkeater, though, was Kindergarten. At the intersection with Barkeater, there were all these tailings piled up, south of the trail.

I saw the sign for Kindergarten, but didn't immediately see where I was supposed to go. It turned out that this was both because the route I was supposed to take wasn't immediately obvious as being rideable, and also because it didn't look like nearly as many people were up for the challenge as were up for Barkeater.

The trail was pretty much one big rock-crawl, end to end, for about half a mile.

There were a bunch of switchbacks, ledges, spots you had to just bounce up, spots where you had to let your tires slip in... It was super tricky. The difference between Barkeater and Kindergarten was way bigger than the difference between the CCT and Barkeater. It was a lot of fun though, if you're into that kind of thing. The challenge becomes not to dab, and I only had to dab once, so I fell pretty good about it. Definitely want to ride it again.

I eventually ended up back at Barkeater, hung a right such that I was able to have ridden the entire trail, then turned around and rode it out.

And, that was kind-of it. Barkeater puts you out close to Ascalon and I just didn't feel like riding much else that day. I'd tweaked my back out the previous Sunday, and though it wasn't hurting at the time, it was questionable, and I didn't want to put too many miles on it. It would turn out later to have been fine, but I didn't know that at the time.

Oh, yeah, also, on the way back I sent this photo to my youngest...

...who is in Lafayette Louisiana with Madi. I thought it was funny that I was also in Lafayette.

Huh huh.