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Sipapu 2017. Never a dull moment!

Mudd Missile

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Mansfield, Tx
This was our third year in a row going up to Sipapu, NM to ride its trails and forest/log roads. Oilfieldtrash, Izz and myself came up to spend 3 days of trail riding and after that whatever our hearts desired. Oilfieltrash arrived in Taos on Thursday and Izz and I arrived Friday afternoon. Oilfield trash brought with him his family, Izz brought his wife, and I brought with me my second oldest daughter. We were planning on spending time riding trails, as well as, hiking, whitewater rafting, mountain biking, etc. Since Oilfieldtrash arrived a day ahead of us, he decided to take his family to Red River and do some jeep touring. His experience was not a pleasant one. His comment was, " I would have paid them $200 each to take us off the trail and off the jeep". He had a family of 4 including himself. Needless to say, it was a misserable experience. The jeep trails were mostly covered with snow so the tour people offered to drive them around on some bumpy roads. He was hurting for the rest of the time he spent with us.
Saturday was our first day of riding and I have heard that all creeks and rivers were way above their normal levels due to massive amouts of snow that the area had received just a few weeks before. During our discussions about were to start, the name Osha and Comales came first to mind to some of us. The first year we rode Comales and Osha, in that order, left me a bittersweet taste in my mouth. Last year I could not ride it due to bike issues. However, Izz and Oilfield enjoyed their time on it. These two trails are not maintain usually untill July, so ther are plenty of surprises waiting for early riders.
So Saturday morning came in and we headed out toward Sipapu and check out Osha trail head, which stars right of the bat by crossing Rio Pueblo. We got there and, after serious consideration, decided that it was better to cross it on the way out and not first thing in the morning. The water was running fast and high. How high? Five days latter still knee high. We went for Comales first and planning on connecting with Osha half way. Here is what happened at Commales.

https://youtu.be/o5DON5uyG7E

Izz was hurt and could not put to much weight on his right leg so Comales was out of the question. We haven't even got to the trailhead and we were encountering down trees and injuries. We opted for an easy ride to see how his leg would hold. We headed for FR 442 or Gallegos Road. Off these road we could jump into Gallegos Canyon Trail, Ojito Maes trail, and others that we were kind of familiar from years back. We started riding around and jumping into whatever logging road looked good.


https://youtu.be/F9iX2X54RyY

https://youtu.be/2sRrdAGO_-4

More to come!
 
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Thanks for the heads up about the jeep ride. It was one of the things on our list of possibilities in three weeks when we stay in Red River. Crossing that one off our list.
 
Thanks for the heads up about the jeep ride. It was one of the things on our list of possibilities in three weeks when we stay in Red River. Crossing that one off our list.

To be fair, the jeep people had to improvise since the regular route was still covered by snow. However, they should have known that.
 
To be fair, the jeep people had to improvise since the regular route was still covered by snow. However, they should have known that.

Well if their idea of fun is to bounce you around, my wife and her back will have none of that.
 
Although the trail was supposed to be easier, we encountered several down trees and Izz had difficulties going over them due to his hurt leg. Every time he tried to use his right leg it felt like it wasn't even there. Nevertheless, he pushed on like a mad dog after a rabbit. We thought we were on Gallegos trail but found out that we were on La Cueva Canyon trail. This was our first time riding this trail even though we thought we had ridden all of them the last couple of years.

https://youtu.be/bWQHlgUUVUA
 
Did Izz get the leg checked to be sure nothing was broken?

He looked like he was just kicking back and taking it easy sitting there in the weeds. I now that sometimes you just have to sit there and wait for the adrenaline to come back down and for your brain to reset, hehe. Hope it was nothing serious!
 
Rode there last year. Beautiful area that most of tx riders don't know about. Hope to go there again soon, usually do Cloudcroft since it's closer.

Thanks for posting.
 
Those trees angled across the trail are down right evil. They have my utmost respect. Hope the the youngun's leg is alright.
 
Those trees angled across the trail are down right evil. They have my utmost respect. Hope the the youngun's leg is alright.

Hi there RG! His leg is alright but eventually showed up a nasty bruise. Nothing like Norbert's Arkansa bruise but still nasty looking. It didn't show up till almost a week later and on the opposite side of the leg. Once I figure out again how to download pictures from my Iphone I'll post some.
 
Hi Scott, Vinny, and RG! We checked his leg alright and Oilfield and I agreed that if he could walk around he was fine to ride! We waited for a while until he felt comfortable moving around. I told him later on to take a few aspirins to thin out his blood a bit. You know, in case of a blood clot. I am trying posting a picture from Smug Mug. I haven't done it in a while.

IMG_5321-M.jpg


IMG_5320-M.jpg


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IMG_5297-M.jpg


IMG_5312-M.jpg
 
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Screw the pictures for a while. I'll stick with the videos for now. The next one is Tio Maes trail which is down less than a mile from Sipapu on the right. It is quite a nice trail with some challenging sections but very duable, short though.

https://youtu.be/c0r2gG1npk8
 
Well if their idea of fun is to bounce you around, my wife and her back will have none of that.

Amen to that! If you are going to be around Red River I suggest to do the Whitewater rafting trip on the Rio Grande. The water level may be lower than when we did it last Tuesday but we had a blast. Call Cottam's and check it out. Also, if you have kids, Red River has a High rope course and sip line that is awesome too. it has three or four levels so it can be challenging for everyone.
 
This is the last trail ride of the first day. It started with a couple of down trees right of the bat. The second one was a bit bigger though. It seems like we do this kind of things quite often either in Arkansas, Colorado, or new Mexico. One place we don't do it is in the Chihuahuan desert. ;-)

https://youtu.be/Uu_dpW5Mk1k
 

The 5 seconds from 0:20 to 0:25 represent me very well. Even the foul and appropriate language. At least there was an attempt. I'd probably have pulled up alongside that tree and just dragged the bike over it probably. Maybe pulled something. I suffer from wheelie deficiency. It's pretty severe. Congrats on eventually making it over.
 
I may need some more assist with the IMG tag for the following pictures!
Second day we decided to explore unknown territory and made a plan to get as close as we could to the Pecos Wilderness Area. We have been looking at some snow covered muntain tops for a couple of years as we rode on the north side of Sipapu. Izz has been itching to get as close as he could without violating any laws. Our plan was to head out to Serpent Lake and see what we could see from there. We went up to the trailhead to check it out and saw that the parking lot was full of vehicles, something very strange in the area. We proceeded to the trailhead and noticed the no motor vehicle sign posted. We felt pretty dissapointted. We started talking about options and what we would do next when a serious lookingh fellow wearing some official outfit came toward us. We were ready to explain that it was not our intention to put our wheels on that trail when the fellow asked us if we were riding in. We expressed to the guy that we just noticed the no vehicles sign and we were ready to head out to another trail, but the fellow interceded and said, we need you to go in there to help us look for a missing hiker. BINGO!!! We hit the jack pot!! We could not believe our ears. We had to reconfirm what we were hearing. We asked, do you need us to ride that trail for you? The guy said, YES! If you don't mind helping us finding a missing 50 year old who is lost some where in the Pecos Wilderness. However, the guy said very clearly that he wasn't giving us permission to ride into the wilderness. He then contacted the man in charge and we were given our mission. We were to approach the mountain ridge from another direction and see if could see the hiker from another ridge. We were asked if we had equipment such as GPS, radios, etc. They were can of impressed at how well prepare we were for such eventuality. we got our call name, mission, and off we went. We had a pretty good idea of the area since we have ridden it before. However, we were not expecting the amount of snow we encounterd at higher elavation. Once we hit 11,000ft we started encountering snow drifts across the trail. we managed as we could but eventually had to called it off. Too much snow.
https://photos.smugmug.com/Sipapu-2017/i-338qPs9/0/50cb683b/M/IMG_5322-M.jpg

https://photos.smugmug.com/Sipapu-2017/i-95jHbWS/0/10f80e0e/M/IMG_5323-M.jpg

https://photos.smugmug.com/Sipapu-2017/i-5x4GWn3/1/9e4ce6ed/M/IMG_5324-M.jpg

https://photos.smugmug.com/Sipapu-2017/i-4bzftqS/0/42759f14/M/IMG_5326-M.jpg

https://photos.smugmug.com/Sipapu-2017/i-5kKrzLb/0/f351c686/M/IMG_5331-M.jpg

https://photos.smugmug.com/Sipapu-2017/i-HVbDFVG/0/619512ff/M/IMG_5334-M.jpg

https://photos.smugmug.com/Sipapu-2017/i-vVN4qNj/0/e93eadfc/O/IMG_5366.jpg




We went back to Sipapu and ran into one of the searchers. He let us know that one of the search and rescue parties found the man. He was not even close to where we were supposed to look. Telephone forensics help a lot in finding this fellow. Thank goodness he was able to sent text out. That was the only way they could triangulate and pin point his location. He was way off course.

Due to some technical difficulties we were not able to film videos on the second day. Izz's contour was out of power and mine was missing the chip. Blame Izz!
 
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Put one of these
[

then this
img

then this
]

then the image link.

then one of these
[

then this
/img

then one of these]

Like this - Quote this post to see how it's done.

IMG_5322-M.jpg


Or click this button in the post editor ->
insertimage.gif


And paste in the link to your image and it will do the work of the img tags for you.
 
(img)link to image(/img)

just replace the ( ) with square brackets [ ].

I think Smugmug has a list of share options for each image where it already has the entire line ready for you to cut/paste that includes the image tags. You just cut paste the link here and you should be good to go. It should be called BBCODE.
 
Thank you Scott and gixxerjasen. I found the key that Scott mentioned. I'll try it next time.
Third day of riding and last one. We planned to explore some trails off FR437 close to Garcia Park. We started with a single track that quickly became impossible to do with our bikes. However, Izz and I were already committed a few yards with no way for me to turn around. I had to back the bike down the trail to a point were I could go down the hill and cross a creek safely. Izz had to flip his bike around with my help. I have the video but I left the camera on and it is too long. After the fiasco, we followed Oilfieldtrash on a logging road he found as we were messing around with the single track. We followed the LR for quite some time encountering numerous down trees that we had to either jump over or go around it somehow.

https://youtu.be/_tp0ItxP0s8

https://youtu.be/6koopUogiyQ

https://youtu.be/g_HhHFRbeg0

https://youtu.be/tyXA47cJTQw
 
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By the end of the third day we were getting better at jumping trees seemed like. We kept running around logging roads until Izz got annoyed by the easeness of the trails. I finally recognize a FR we ran into and headed toward the end of it knowing that there was a trail there that would take us back to Taos going downhill all the way to Hwy518.

https://youtu.be/9_hE6Jt6urw
 
Tree hopping is a skill that has long eluded me. I've yet to successfully clear anything more than a few inches in diameter :doh: Like Izz, I usually end up on my backside... :flip:
 
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