Riding around the trails between June Lake and Mammoth Lakes, part of the Inyo National Forest (North).
As planned, we all woke up with the sun. A little coffee, and we were all busy getting ready for the day. Michele and Ernie were off to the Grand Canyon, Tomm and I were going to spend the day exploring the many many trail systems around Mammoth Lakes.
I had a bunch of these routes loaded up in my Gaia Maps (sitting in my ipad mini 5 on my dash).
The first issue we had was that my bike was literally frozen. I think Michele’s phone said it got down to 19 degrees overnight. You might remember that I had flushed my radiator fluid as part of the prep. You might also remember that I noted that the new fluid was supposed to keep the bike cooler BUT it wasn’t an antifreeze. Hell, I even said I didn’t need it!
So, my bike’s radiator fluid had frozen solid. I gave the bike a start and it started up just fine. Knowing a little about mechanics I knew better than just letting the bike idle away so I parked it in the path of the rising sun and started it up every few minutes. After a little more than an hour, everything that was supposed to be liquid, was.
We suited up and headed out. We decided to ride to the north first. We found a trail that somewhat mirrored the Hwy and was labelled the Mammoth Lakes to June Lake Trail.
You could tell that it had some decent traffic and from the whoops and bermed turns you could tell that traffic was probably side by sides.
Some of the trail was deep granite gravel (kind of like sand). Nobody likes sand, right? But this was really the first time I had ridden the bike off road so that was good.
The trail led up to and then to the west, around something called Obsidian Mound. As we got to the mound there’s a steep gravel uphill section that we captured a little video on.
Obsidian Mound is an abrupt mini mountain of exactly that. I’ve never seen obsidian in the wild and here we were riding up a mountain of it. I thought about all the sharp edges that might shred my tires. Luckily that didn’t happen but we were really riding on obsidian gravel. At one point I reached down and picked up a chunk and brought it home.
We continued north above Obsidian Mound and got to the gas station at June Lake and Hwy 395. A quick fill up of gas for Tomm and we headed back down to camp, had a bite to eat and headed out to ride the southern trails.
After a quick veggie dog we headed south. Instead of the deep granite gravel, the southern trails were much more groomed, much less gravel. For the rest of the day we rambled through all sorts of wooded trails between camp and the town. We decided the trails to the south were much more to our liking! 👍
We didn’t get a chance to ride any of the trails on the other side of Hwy 395 (east side), and there are plenty of them! That’s ok, we plan on coming back to ride!
Tomorrow is a driving day.
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, had a big cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and is currently building a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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