Saturday, August 28, 2010 - Ride Day at Mendocino

Much of the National Forest is dedicated to ORV's, in fact, from the look of the place, this would be the place to train if dirt bikes were an Olympic sport, but the wilderness is off-limits to them, so that's where we headed. The ranger station had a fabulous, expensive, water-resistant map of the ORV trails, but nothing on the equestrian trails. I had managed to persuade one of the workers down at the ranger station to photocopy a map of the wilderness they had hanging on the door, just enough so we could plan our trail day, but it wasn't terribly revealing. At least it would (hopefully) keep us from getting lost. We headed out around 11:00. The first mile or so was pretty good, not too stony, fairly wide trails with just ordinary hill and dale kind of riding. Once we crossed the creek, it was another story! First there were two adolescents shooting off a gun or fireworks or something within 20 yards of the trail (in spite of a very visible sign at the trail head about having to be 150 yards off the trail), but some hikers we met earlier had warned u they were there, and we heard them as we approached. They didn't hear us, though, and there was a couple of exchanged with them getting them to quit while we passed, which they did for about 10 seconds. Fortunately our guys are getting so used to hearing gunshots in the forest they hardly pay it any mind anymore. Then, we started climbing... and climbing... and climbing. No pesky switchbacks here, most of the trail went practically straight up! The further we went, the narrower the trail got, and in some places, we were literally hugging the side of the mountain, with the trail only about a foot wide, and in some cases, sloping DOWNHILL, with a precipitous dropoff an inch away. The trail had gotten rocky, so we had stopped to put boots on, and parts of the trail was loose rocks and dirt, making the liklihood of a slip much greater. Five miles of uphill climb! Not fun unless your horse likes to pretend he's a mountain goat! We finally reached a point where we could stop for lunch, where I climbed up to a peak for a better view. It was an okay view, nothing as spectacular as many others I've seen, and certainly not worth all the work to get there. We hadn't quite reached the crossroads where several other loops joined this trail, and appeared to be more level on the top of the mountain, but frankly by this time, we had had enough. We headed back down, down, down, slipping and sliding a lot of the way. Going straight down isn't fun for anyone, but our guys were troopers the whole way. Thank goodness they're so good! If there had been even a little bit of a fuss, someone would have been down the slope at the bottom of the mountain, bleeding or dead. By the time we got home we were exhausted again. We gave the horses an extra ration of grain as a reward, then flung ourselves into our recliners. It was then that we made the decision to leave on Monday, although originally we were going to stay until Tuesday. Neither of us wanted to ride these trails again, and not being able to have a cell phone signal nearby was problematic, as we had so many irons in the fire work-wise right now. Freedom is wonderful, it certainly allows for last minute changes without any fuss!