32 miles in 6 hours...

On Saturday James wanted to ride a portion of the "Cabin Loop" just above the Mogollon rim North of Strawberry. I managed to get a few hours of sleep before the alarm went off at 4:30. We met at the entrance to Rim road, FR300 I think, at around 6:30 and drove in to the trailhead.

The drive out to the trailhead was amazing beautiful. We drove along Rim road for 12 miles with endless views of the desert below. This area burned some tie ago which made the views even more spectacular.

We saw a few large bull Elk in velvet on the roadside. Not enough time to get a picture of them though.

Descending down into the first of many canyons we ended up crossing.

James was digging his newly re-built fork...something about floating on a cloud.

Parts of the trail were defiantly pretty faint..but the ferns were awsome.

At the bottom of yet another wet, loose sketchy descent down into an amazing lush creekbed...all the greenery made up for the heinous climbs back out of these canyons.

Riding through fields of Lupine.

It was hard to belive that we were in Arizona for quite a bit of the ride.

There was a few sections that made for nice hiking...as James put it, "at least its not kinda a hike-a-bike..."

Lucky we found some sweet, fast single-track once we started heading back North. Note the ferns stuck in James' shifters...yeah, they were shoulder high.

This is a taste of that trail...I didn't get any pictures of the really good bits cause I didn't want to stop.

Then we came across this awsome flag-stone bridge leading to a cabin and spring.

There was a sprig flowing from under the rock cave to the right of the old chimney.

Old Shepards cabin, there were 6 or more of these in various states of dis-repair along the trail. Most of the springs seemed to have a cabin built next to them, handy.

View off of the rim.

View of the Peaks from Mormon Lake.