Gooseberry

Short Version:
Hard rain, hard ride. Hard, awesome ride. With hard rocks to land on, and cacti without spikes. Lovely stuff.

Long Version:
Cold. Rain overnight, and we could see more coming. When it arrived, we discovered that some of it was hail.

We rode anyway: South Rim Trail, Cattle Guard and God's Skateboard Bowl sections; Hidden Canyon; North Rim Trail; White and Yellow Trails to the Point; South Rim Rattlesnake section; Hidden Canyon; North Rim and White back to camp. No idea how much ground we covered, and all the backtracking and re-riding we did means that working it out would be onerous. We were out for just over five hours, and pretty much all of it was demanding, rewarding, difficult technical riding. A lot of it followed the edge of a more-or-less long-way-down cliff, which was occasionally scary. We were pleased that the strong, gusty wind was coming up over the rim, pushing us away from the edge instead of towards or over it. One of us (not Nene) face-planted on some rocks at one point - ironically, on the easier-than-most North Rim Trail. We both rode stuff we didn't know we could ride, had a bunch of fun, and ended up blimmin tired, and really really happy after some of the best riding we'd found on the trip to date. We'd seen heaps of prickly-pears, including many carrying startling crimson fruit and some with no prickles (unprickly pears? smooth pears? nubby pears?). We also met lots of Canadians, including a bloke from Merritt, a woman from Canmore and one from Golden, and two chaps from Victoria, including the business partner of one of the guys with whom we rode the Mckenzie River Trail back in June. Small, small world.

The trails were great, so we stayed the night and rode again in the morning. Tentative arrangements to meet some of the Canadians in the morning were thwarted, at least temporarily, by the end of Daylight Savings - no wonder I was grouchy; I got up at six! - but we did eventually hook up with Merritt Darch for an hour or so towards the end of the three and a half hours we were out. We re-rode some of the stuff we'd ridden the day before, and some new stuff, including an easy roll out to a derelict windmill and back. The wind was substantially weaker than the day before, and the sun was shining. Hidden Canyon the opposite direction was awesome, as was God's Skateboard Bowl. We met another set of Canadians, then ate reconstituted mashed potato mixed with tinned sweetcorn back at the van before setting off south and east into Arizona, home of the Grand Canyon.