Cloudcroft, New Mexico

October 2009. Telford and I got to spend a weekend in Cloudcroft. It was the best weekend. We drove up there on Friday after work and stayed at my cousin Nick's cabin in Mayhill. We were pretty much roughing it in the cabin. It didn't have a bathroom and is in the middle of remodeling. But we survived the night. But we listened to elk bugle all night long.





On Saturday we woke up to go dirt biking, Whoot Whoot! We went to talk to a forest ranger about what trails we could ride on, and the ranger was a big fat turd. He was so mad that we were dirtbikers. He obviously had some personal problems with dirt bikers. He could barely tell us what trails we could ride.




Anyways, we ended up riding the "Rim Trail" single track. It was a very narrow and rocky trail. It was a pretty ride, and it overlooked White Sands.

It reminded me of the Highline trail in Soda. If you get off the trail, your bike is giong to fall a ways down. But it was super fun. We seen some pretty fall colors along the way. On our ride back, my back tire slipped of the trail, so I immediately layed my bike over so I would go off the trail. I waited for Tel to turn around and help me lift my bike back onto the trail. After he helped me, I continued down the trail, while he turned his bike around. After a while of him not catching up to me, I turned back around to go find him. Tel had tried turning his bike around on the super narrow trail, and in the process, his bike slid off the trail a few yards. It was way too steep for him to ride the bike back onto the trail. So I got down by his bike to help him. We were trying to walk the bike back onto the trail. But that was not working, it would peel out every time. I started thinking how bad this sucked because I knew I wasn't too much help for Tel. If he had another guy with him, they could probably get the bike up with out a problem. But then Tel said that one time Bob Lee's bike was in this same situation one time, and it was hard with four guys trying to get the bike back on the trail. So after that, I knew we weren't going to be able to get the bike back up on our own. We tried everything for about 20 minutes. We finally cleared a really good path that went across the mountain, because we couldn't push it straight up. Me and Tel together pushed the bike. Each time we pushed it would move the bike a couple of feet, which we were so happy about. He slowly kept doing that untill we got the bike back on the trail 45 or so minutes later. We were so dang exhausted after that. It was a good thing we were on our way back or else that would have ruined us for the rest of the day.So we slowly made our way back to the truck.

We stopped and took pictures of the pretty Fall Colors

After we got loaded up, we went to An Apple Fest that was going on in Cloudcroft. We walked around all the vendors and bought a couple boxes of apples for my cousin. There was also this store called the "Apple Barn" that we loved. I got me some really cute apple salt and pepper shakers. Then we ate at some BBQ place. Then we drove around for a couple of hours in the mountains. It was so nice to be up in the mountains. We seen a billion deer and Blue Jays all weekend.

When it started getting dark, we headed back to the cabin for the evening. There was one of those portable fire pits on the deck of the cabin, so we decided to have a little fire on the road in front of the cabin. We just sat out and relaxed for a couple of hours. We pretended we had marshmallows too, ok..maybe I was just imagining I had one, I don't know about Tel. He was probably wishing he had a steak or something.



The next morning we woke up and hiked the "Osha Trail." It was a fun, short hike.




The trail overlooked the White Sands. During our hike we heard what we thought was a deer running through the trees close to us. Then all of a sudden there was a deer that darted on the path and was running straight toward us. Tel and I both froze. When the deer kept getting closer, I darted off the trail, and that scared the deer and made it turn a different direction. I think the deer thought we were trees or something, because we weren't moving, and he was running right at us. So it livened up our hike for a minute. After our hike, we headed home to Carlsbad.