East Pioneers Trail 2758

The weather was so stellar all weekend that I got motivated to head back down to the Pioneers to explore trails on the mountain bike.  I called the Forest Service and figured out exactly where bikes were allowed, and what had recently been closed to us.  Armed with this knowledge and some good beta from Mike B I headed down into the Pioneers towards the O'Dell trailhead.

There was no one else in the parking lot when I drove to the trailhead so it was going to be a nice peaceful ride with perfect temps to boot.  Mike warned me that it was going to be a bit of a rough ride and suggested going with the full squish and gears...I have not been on the single speed since my knee episode (not quite 100% and there is no need to tempt fate with regressing).  It ended up being about a 14 mile ride with roughly 3,000 ft of elevation gain.

At times, the trail reminded me of some East Coast stylin' ridin' with lots of rocks and roots - get that tech game on and pick a good line while pedaling.  The gameplan was to do an out and back or perhaps even a loop if time allowed or a spur looked interesting enough.

The trail takes you by three lakes.  The first lake you come to is O'Dell Lake which would be the largest lake I would pass that day.  Most of the riding to the lake was uphill but fairly mellow on rideable trail with some sections that you had to get out of the saddle to navigate through.

The trail then got steeper, rockier, and more technical and you had a short section of hike a bike until it leveled back out and took you by Lake of the Woods:

After Lake of the Woods, the trail went downhill, got pretty steep and more technical.  Riding downhill was not much of a problem but I remember thinking there was going to be some hike a bike on the way back.  About a mile later the trail opened up to yet another lake...this time it was Schwinger (no Austin Powers reference intended....)

I decided to venture onwards and see if I could find the next lake.  As I got a couple of miles beyond the lake, the terrain turned ROUGH!  The trail got very steep and it consisted of nothing but soccer size and bigger boulders that made it tough going.  At that point the skies started to get a little dark and I figured it would be a good idea to head back.  Looking at the map indicated I was close to the next lake but it will just have to wait until the next time out...

The ride back was straight forward and once I got back to O'Dell Lake the view opened up big time:

All in all it was a great ride with beautimous weather and a sneaking suspicion that our window of opportunity to ride in these conditions might be closing.

A couple of random encounters along the adventure included an old abandoned rig:

A grouse in full plumage getting is mojo going with the 2 females in the same tree (maybe he is a mormon grouse?):

passing through a cool funky gate:

with an even niftier gate latch:

All in all it was a great weekend filled with enough random things that made me appreciate the quirkiness of the spirit of adventure and how it fills the soul...