Bike tour: Day 4 - Gates Pass and the Tucson Loop

[expedition_retirement]

 After our far too brief visit to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, we mounted our bike for the longest ride of the trip. Our route was to take us up and over Gates Pass back to Tucson and then around the Tucson Loop bike trails system to our hotel. We left the museum parking lot and started out on Kinney Road, which is the main road into the western part of the Saguaro National Park, and thus had its fair share of traffic. The road was two lanes, without any shoulder, so the cars had to share the road with us and respect our right-of-way. Luckily, we were only on that road for about a mile before we turned off to the road over the pass. This road still had traffic on it, but it also had a significant number of bicycles, and presented a serious climb up to the top of the pass. Our e-bikes meant that the climb wasn't too burdensome, and the ride down the other side was all about managing our speed to ensure we didn't allow the bikes to go faster than was safe. The sides of the mountains as we climbed up, over, and through the pass were covered with thousands of tall saguaro cacti, a veritable forest of them.

When we reached Tucson, on the other side of the pass, our route took us off of the roads and streets and put us on the excellent bike trails that make up the Tucson Loop. Our ride took us north along the banks of the Santa Cruz River until it met the Rillito River, where we turned and followed that most of the way back to our hotel. The last few miles put us back on city streets, but with bike lanes now. The Tucson Loop is not only a well maintained, paved bike trail, but it also links lots of park land tucked alongside the rivers. As we rode along, we saw roadrunners and whole colonies of Round-tail Ground Squirrels (which I mistook for tiny prairie dogs when I saw them...they look and behave similarly) all along the trail, especially along the Rillito River section. The river beds (completely dry this time of year) included numerous homeless encampments made up of tents and other make-do shelters. At one point, near the end of the ride, we saw some ahead of us, and arrived to find a brush fire down in the riverbed. Luckily a local was already calling the fire department, because I wasn't sure I would have been able to accurately describe the location to the dispatcher. We were still on the trail when the fire engine arrived and the fire fighters began rappelling down into the river channel to put out the fire.

The total mileage for the day was more than 35 miles, but with the exception of the climb up Gates Pass, it really wasn't a difficult ride and it was a little hard to believe we had gone that far, except for the amount of time it took.