A friend and neighbor who’s lived here longer than me and grown bored with The Duck! City menu of cycling possibilities proposed we try something a wee bit off the beaten path this week.
And so we motored up NM-337 a ways, parked at the Otero Canyon Trailhead, hopped aboard our trusty cyclocross bikes, and took a 21-mile tour of the rolling back alleys to the east and south, beginning with Juan Tomas Road and ending with Oak Flat Road.
Phil had warned me that we were headed for some steep, gnarly bits that could only be described as “roads” because they were passable by horse or halftrack. But they weren’t any worse than some of the knee- and tire-popping Paris-Roubaix-style bighorn-sheep circuits I used to wrangle in CusterTucky County, so I got along just fine on the old Steelman Eurocross with its new 34x32T low end and 33mm Donnelly MXPs.
To be sure, long stretches were steep as medical bills, with ruts that may recently have channeled hot lava, enough bad lines for a Sylvester Stallone film festival emceed by Carrot Top, and more baby-heads than the basement of the John Wayne Gacy Memorial Montessori School in Hell, if your idea of a baby is a 45-year-old Scandinavian blacksmith who dabbles in professional wrestling, rugby, and steroids.
But we saw plenty of wildflowers, and the motorists were mostly parked, hunting piñon.
Oak Flat dumped us back onto NM-337, just below the Morning Star Grocery, and we had a fine, high-speed plummet to our parking spot. As roller-coaster rides go it was worth the price of admission and then some.
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