Theme song: Hoops by The Reubens.
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| Bikes loaded! |
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| Arizona is...special |
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| Great to be on a very familiar bike: stumpy with dropper post |
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| Beautiful singletrack through high meadows on the Arizona Trail, north rim |
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| First view of the canyon. The other side is a very long way away. |
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| Day 1 campsite! |
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| Break at the top of a climb the next day |
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| Mix of singletrack and doubletrack. Navigation was complicated, there's a ton of fire roads and trails going all over the place. |
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| Lookout right near our campsite for day 2. Stupidly spectacular view. |
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| Here we are! The Rainbow Rim is a bucket list MTB trail. Great singletrack right next to the rim of the Grand Canyon. |
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| Really. Right next to it for a lot of the time. |
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| Set up the tents then went for a bonus excursion on fantastic rainbow rim single track before dinner. |
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| Looks like rain is coming. It sure did, there was some emergency tent pitching by some of our people who were just sleeping outside and got pretty soaked. |
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| Day 3: Full length (50km) of the Rainbow Rim! |
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| Those clouds may not look that bad, but a serious storm arrived. Tons of thunder and lightning, heavy rain, and even hail for a while. I almost gave up and turned back at one point. The lightning was particularly frightening given we were often exposed on rocky ledges with solitary tall trees.... |
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| Made it to the end! Bizarrely up this end didn't seem to have gotten wet at all. |
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| Storm continues all around us |
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| Making for what is probably the most spectacular sunset I've seen in my life |
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| Final day featured a lot more jeep roads than single track. The main event was trying to soak each other by jumping bikes into the puddles created by the storm :) |
