A bit of New Mexico: My Saturday Long Ride

This Saturday I had an excellent long ride. It was excellent for a few reasons, first I got to spent the first part of the ride with friends and fellow Outlaws Bones, Sharkbait and Ricky V. I headed from home down to our usual meeting place and we spun out down the Bosque north through Corrales and out to the Jemez Dam. After doing the Jemez Dan run I split off to log the extra miles.

I headed west out U.S. 550 to the village of San Ysidro. To the right you can see a picture of the old Spanish church at San Ysidro. Here is the second reason my ride was so excellent, though it was a little windy as the day progressed the sky was that New Mexico cobalt blue with hardly a cloud in the sky and you could see for miles, all the mesas with their varried colors of red, gray, tan, sand and green...you see clearly all the way to the Jemez mountains, which is where I was headed.

At San Ysidro I pealed off onto NM 4 headed into the Jemez foothills towards the Pueblo of Jemez. To the right you can see a traditional version of their pottery. After the Pueblo I kept on going deeper into the foothills until I reached my turn around point for the day, the Tosee Red Rocks. Unfortunatly Blogger refuses to let me show you any more of my beautiful state.

Finally, the third reason the ride was so excellent, it contained lots of hills. I've mentioned before that as a Clyde the old power to weight ratio isn't there for me to be a great climber but for my size I am pretty good. Below you can see the elevation profile for my ride, which I created with National Geographic's Topo!. By the end of the ride I had covered 107.3 miles in a respectable 5 hours, 34 minutes and 15 seconds.