Saturday Ride 2: Apex Park

My original plan had been to ride the Dakota Ridge loop in the morning, get some lunch and then ride another trail in the afternoon, but since I finished the first ride before 10, I decided to ride another trail before lunch.

Apex Park is just down the road, so it was just a few minutes before I was riding again. The trails on Apex look rather like a maze, and there are restrictions on which direction you can ride on which day. It's a really challenging and fun trail, so it's well used, despite (or because of?) the fact that it climbs 1000 ft in the first two miles. Because it looks like a maze, I was hopeful I might be able to latch onto some other riders for help deciding which route to take. By 10 a.m. on Saturday morning, there was no shortage of riders to latch onto. The bigger problem really was not running into them. It worked out fine. I ended up riding with a guy on a chocolate-colored Santa Cruz Nickel who knew his way around pretty well. It's not that I was worried about getting lost, just that I wasn't sure which trails were ridden best in which direction, and what would be the most logical route to use.


So Apex was fun, but it was mostly wide open and exposed with lots of switchbacks and water bars. There were a few, fun, flowing sections on Grubstake Loop (the northern loop), but overall a lot of long, straight, loose, rocky sections throughout. Since it was always going up or down, pretty strongly, it was definitely a lot of work. This won't likely make it into my list of favorites, but I'll have to ride it a few more times to see how I feel about it. I'll also have to go back on an even-numbered day when I can ride the fun sections in the fun direction. That may make a big difference.

Here's the Garmin log.

I think because I was riding with someone else, I forgot to stop and take pictures. I got a couple, but nothing  especially interesting. Except yucca. Not much of that in Michigan.

There is one interesting little thing I should include here. It actually happened earlier that morning when I was getting ready to ride Dakota Ridge. Knowing I was going to try to get in some miles, I had filled my Camelbak with plenty of water before leaving the house. Getting ready to ride, I laid all my gear out on the tailgate of my truck, but when I picked up my Camelbak I found that it was sitting in a large pool of water, which was also running off the tailgate all over the ground. The bladder in my Camelbak holds about 100 fluid ounces, and it appeared I'd spilled perhaps two thirds of that. I had flipped the valve to the 'off' position, but I guess not quite far enough to the 'off' position. The weight of the bag on the valve had caused it to leak and I had lost most of my water.

By the time we finished a couple of varied loops around the Apex trails, I'd logged around 15 miles and 3000 ft of climbing (including the earlier ride on Dakota Ridge). That was about all I had, especially since I had run out of water and my stomach had run out of contents. It was definitely burrito time.