The Little Things

When it comes to mountain biking, Baja is a very simple place to understand. The plants are all sharp and if you touch them you will bleed. The ground beneath your tires will be either rocks or sand, or some combination of the two. It will eat your tires, and while there is traction to be had, there is also a guaranteed amount of drift involved. For the most part, the peninsula is not very heavily populated and there are three spectacularly abrupt mountain ranges along its length. As such, singletrack as we know it in the modern, “built” sense is a rare sight. The bulk of the peninsula is raw and rough; trails either follow arroyos or animal paths, and not much of that incredible steep terrain is easily accessible for the shredding. And, as alluded to a few sentences ago, when it comes to shredding, Baja is more inclined to dish out the carnage than receive it.

The first time I ever rode mountain bikes down here was around 1995. I had been coming down and sea kayaking since the late ‘80s, but had never really thought that it was the kind of place that I would seek out for mountain biking. Listening to the epic tales of gritty survival as told by Steve Garro and Joe Murray did nothing to further entice me. But at some point, Grant Lamont took it upon himself to put on a four day stage race down in Los Barriles, and I found myself down there on my electric blue Rock Lobster one speed, toeing the line to get my ass handed to me by a bunch of very fit young Mexican kids. I bled. A lot. Everyone did.

The embryonic trails hacked through the thorny landscape on shifty loose dirt left no margin of error. Try to cut a tight line on corner entry, clip a cactus, bleed. Get your entry right but drift wide on corner exit, clip a cactus, bleed. Scrub a tire dropping down a ledgy cascade of rocks, yard sale into the ground, the surface being a nuggety sedimentary stew that had hardened some millions of years ago into the earthy equivalent of a rasp file, bleed. If you wanted to go fast, which is kind of the point with racing, you had to be prepared to bleed. Bleed, bleed, bleed. Nothing too deep, hopefully no stitches required, but when the muggy heat and sweaty exertion levels were factored in, it was an almost comically gory four days of racing.

I didn’t come back with a mountain bike for about another decade. By this time, the baby trails of Los Barriles were beginning to expand and grow into an actual network. Carved out by kiteboarders who needed to burn off excess energy when the wind wasn’t blowing, the trails in Los Barriles spiderwebbed jankily out into the desert. The same growth of a scene was happening, for the same reasons, in nearby La Ventana. But the rest of the peninsula remained, by and large, terra incognita.

Loreto, where my mother has lived since the early 1990s, where I am now eddied out for an undefined period, has long been a near perfect example of the futility of mountain biking in this inhospitable place. There were always a few road riders, local and expat alike, but ask around about mountain biking and more often than not you’d get invited to go fishing instead, or maybe talk to Trudi Angell and see about taking a mule ride through the Sierra de la Giganta. But ride mountain bikes? Why?

Nevertheless, I would try. Sneaking out through the arroyos in search of trail hints, following hoofprints. Out past where the old dump used to be, across expanses of shattered glass, old tin cans rusting into the salty ground, navigating by animal carcasses. “Go left after the big pile of fish heads, then follow the arroyo upstream until you come to the goat skeleton, turn right there, start looking for the barbed wire on the ground…” Skunked, time and time again. It was not really mountain biking, not the way I like to think of mountain biking, but it would keep me entertained in between interminable rounds of backgammon among a cadre of cutthroat nonagenarians, would offer some hopeful caloric buyback against the onslaught of margaritas and lard-heavy tortillas.

But now? Hold the phone. Now there’s a trail. Two of them, technically, but they are right next to each other and not very long and so for the sake of sanity may as well link them up and smash them out together. Technically, academically, they have been here for a few years, but the rideability of them has been generally been questionable. So I was surprised to find, after returning from this most recent trip north to gringolandia, that not only were these two little gems up and running, but they are running good. Someone has put some work in.

All told, there’s about 5 miles of trail. From my apartment, I can ride up the San Javier road, rip a lap of these, and back to the house in an hour and a half. If I want to explore a little, and also “benefit” from the mountain biking equivalent of sand dune sprints, I can tack on a few more miles of highway then slog my way back down the arroyo to town. But the Baja 1000 ran down it in November and churned it up good, so one really needs to be wanting to bite down hard on one’s masochistic side to revel in that particular slow motion pain. This is still not mountain biking in the Big Epic sense of things.

I used to want my mountain biking to always be Big and Epic. Long climbs, long descents, old-school high-country singletrack. Everything else seemed less than awesome. In retrospect, I was a fussy bitch. Nowadays, I’m a lot easier to please. Feed me a little bit of loose, skatey, punchy, weird, sketchy trail that is guaranteed to make me bleed every time I ride it, let there be energy sucking sand traps and off-camber corner exits and sniper rocks and feral cattle, and I feel like I just won the damn lottery.

Singletrack. In Loreto. Hallelujah!