I guess this ride is technically closer to Tesuque and Nambe, but we’ll call it Santa Fe since they need something cool to associate themselves with besides native American “art”, Val Kilmer and a lame spiral staircase. We started this ride by parking on FR102 at State Rd. 592 and started the long climb up 102 through Pacheco Canyon and past the legendary lesbian compound. It’s about a 7 mile climb – pretty gradual. At Aspen Meadows we jumped on the Rio en Medio trail for about ½ mile then back
onto the fire road and finally left onto the most northern portion of the Borrego Trail. This part of the Borrego does not get much use and it looked as if we were the first ones down it this year. Lots of branches and crap on the trail, which was already pretty technical. Bad ass down hill all the way to Nambe Creek. At the creek we headed west, still downhill and finally hit a clearing and the trail intersection to Rancho Viejo. Three hours in and have not seen anybody.....nice. Continuing down the creek we hit the cutoff back to Rio en Medio trail which starts off with a nice little hike-a-bike up an old drainage and finally back on to something that sort of resembles a trail. This climb and the next one are pretty brutal. After the second ridge it’s all fast downhill to En Medio. Back on the pavement for a few miles (including a nasty little climb at the end) before we reached the beer…um, I mean the car. That’s where John realized he left his wallet at one of our stops along the way – oh crap! Luckily we found it next to the forest road in Pacheco Canyon and were able to drive there – good thing because I really didn’t want to do another lap on that trail.
Number of times we had to look at the map to figure out where the hell we were: 20
Number of miles: 21
How long it took (hours): 4
Number of people saw in the first 20 miles: 1
Wallets lost:1
Beers drank: Fat Tire, Sam Adams
