I headed out of the state park about 9am after finally finding the park ranger to pay for my camp site, and pretty quickly found some more mud. Much of my riding was straddling a tiny area of semi-dry ground beside the completely saturated (and often underwater) road. I finally made it to New Mexico, and magically the mud was gone. Things stayed with the flat mesa motif for a while, then I dropped into kind of a little valley that had some foothills on the other side. This was really my first sign of anything mountainous since TN. Eventually I came to a fork in the trail, one path was ‘normal’ and one was ‘easy’, with both being about the same distance until they reconnected. I went for normal, and I went 5 or 10 miles in before I came to a gate that said No Trespassing, No Bikes, etc. However, this gate wasn’t locked. I remember vaguely reading about someone else coming to a gate like this and going through it and saying that it was BLM land so no one could make rules like No Bikes on public land, but I wasn’t sure if it was the same spot. Well I went through that gate and about 50 yds past it was another gate, this time locked, and with an 8ft game fence. Between the two fences was a road, so I consulted my map and it looked like I could bypass the game fenced area if I went around. Well I did, and it did, and some everything was great. Then the terrain started getting tricky, the most off-road I’ve been the whole trip since NC. Very rocky accents and descents. My wr250r really impressed me, hauling me and my 100 pounds of junk up anything I aimed it up. This was really slow, and at times the trail was so faint I couldn’t even tell if I was in the right place. A couple of hours later, I finally popped out on a ‘major’ gravel road and the rest of the afternoon went smooth. I made it to Trinidad first, which was the longest segment without gas that I’ve tackled thus far, 160 miles. I decided to keep going and headed another 70 miles to La Veta. A thunderstorm had been following me and I wasn’t really having much luck with the forest service website looking for campgrounds in the San Isabel National Forest, so I found an RV park that let me tent camp for $10.
