Bikepacking on the Caja del Rio (and the Great April Windbreaker Rescue)

After a few checkout rides, we took our new Bike Friday All-Packa small-wheel folding bikes on their inaugural bikepacking adventure to the Caja del Rio plateau.  It’s a short but suitably rugged 12 mile route from home out to a scenic overlook of “Dead Dog junction” which looks better than it sounds. A thick basalt layer caps the plateau, and where the old lava flow ends there’s an escarpment that drops a hundred feet or so down to Alamo Creek and the historic El Camino de Tierra Adentro. https://www.nps.gov/elca/learn/historyculture/index.htm

The route out there takes us down the dirt road from our house to (and through) a sandy arroyo, then onto a trail that is mostly used by horses. Lots of sand, with pits inflicted by the horses’ hooves; not very friendly to loaded bikes with little wheels! Once we hit a dirt access road, things smoothed out and we rolled along into Forest Service lands.

There we found a lot of trash; it’s a convenient place for people to camp on the cheap, only a mile or so off the paved road. It doesn’t take long to get past the camping area, but the road still sees a lot of vehicle traffic when conditions are wet, so it’s lumpy and rutted and kind of slow going.

Right at a fork, and the road became a lot less used as more to our liking. Soon we were at the edge of the mesa, and picked our campsite with a scenic view. While cooking dinner, we watched the clouds roll across the landscape and dump moisture on the Sangre de Cristo mountains across from us. As the clouds moved along, we could see that they had dropped a fresh coat of snow on the peaks! A flask cocktail nightcap sent us off to bed, but it was a chilly night and my sleeping pad developed a leak that left me on the ground by morning.

After breakfast we packed up the gear and went looking for the route down off the escarpment. After a little scouting we found the trail, which was steep and loose enough at the top that it required some hike-a-bike to get down to more manageable terrain. Then it was a long uphill slog through the washboard and sand of Buckman Road back to home.

Upon arriving at the house and initial disgorgement of gear, Anna discovered she was missing her beloved Patagonia windbreaker. We quickly embarked on a rescue mission!  It had to have fallen out of a side pocket from her backpack, but when and where were complete unknowns. So we had to start from scratch - but with a faster and unloaded bike, at least! Anna started retracing the route, while I took the truck and met her at the points where the single track intersected the road. 

We tag-teamed all the way back out to our campsite, but at that point I needed to make a big loop back down off the mesa in the truck, while she rode the drop off. When we met back up about 40 minutes later, she raised the pink windbreaker in triumph - she found it not far down the hike-a-bike trail we had ridden first thing in the morning!

Because the odds of finding the windbreaker seemed low, given the distance we had covered and the number of people on the roads, actually recovering the item really made the day.