Day 8-And Now For An Elephant Head…Trail

We came to Arizona to get away from the rain! However, I will admit that it doesn’t last long. It’s like at home we say if you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes…here it is more like 2 minutes. It rained off and on a bit into the night. When I got up in the middle of the night, there were some stars. It wasn’t as clear as some nights have been, though. 

We planned to skip the next black section when we saw there was an easy short cut. Jana likes the black sections, but she did it last night, so we were good to do the short cut. 

See the shortcut?


The shortcut went through an abandoned ranch. 


We popped back to the route after the black part a few more miles of gravel road to W. Arivaca Rd, which brought us into Arivaca Junction. 

A little shrine to Guadalupe. 

We needed a bit of resupply (Dollar General), then went to the Longhorn for lunch. 

Some serious horns at the Longhorn. 

Bike parking at the Longhorn. 

After stuffing ourselves, we headed back out in sprinkling rain. Again, it stopped after a few minutes. I got started ahead of the others as we had an 8.45 mile climb of which some would be singletrack (turns out only .64 was singletrack, but more on that in a moment).

We had planned 16 more miles after lunch. Fortunately, there were a number of paved miles (even though it was climbing), then some decent gravel, and back to some pavement, before going to gravel again. 

That’s Elephant Head Mountain to the left. We were headed there. 

Once we hit the final gravel, the climb got a whole lot steeper. I had to walk some because I just ran out of steam. I did think to myself that this wasn’t even the singletrack yet!

The first section of singletrack was the Quantrell Mine Trail. I was walking after just a very short bit (I am not a mountain biker!). Occasionally, I had brief moments where I could ride. 

This was one of those moments. 

There were some REALLY difficult spots. Once I got to the top, then I had the idea to lower my seat post as a sort of a dropper post. I was then able to ride some of the parts of the descent. But…mostly…I walked. At least I could walk a little faster going down then pushing Billy up. 

We finally came out to more of a double track, but I still had to walk large portions. It was just too scary with all the rocks. And then there was deep pockets of sand. 

We didn’t get quite as far as we had hoped, but found a decent enough campsite, and called it home. 

Okay, I’m kind of camped in the road intersection…but it’s mostly flat. 

Tonight is our last night camping. Tomorrow we will make it back to Tucson, and the end of our adventure. Today was one of the tougher days as far as hike-a-bike goes, but we knew this was not going to be an easy section. We have a few more miles of this tomorrow, but then it should be smooth sailing downhill back to our hotel.