Cartoon-lands!

My preference would be to climb in the cool of morning and descend in the afternoon but that's not always how the land lies and there is much to be said for starting the day with an exhilarating downhill - three times in the last section, wahoo!  The long slog up Mingus Mountain in the heat of the day is not easy to forget especially the discovery that it was far from over at the road summit.  Another 3kms of even steeper, rough dirt track to camp seemed unnecessary.  A quietly beautiful site with huge, aromatic Ponderosa pine trees soothed our indignation and the prospect of hurtling out of camp and snaking down for seven miles in the morning positively cheering!

Down it goes...

As far as the eye could see in the low morning light.

Bike trails tend to wander so we've ridden very few but an exception this week was through an ancient granite landscape with features called 'dells', strongly reminiscent of the tors on Dartmoor and well worth a bit of traffic-free dalliance.  The trail eventually delivered us on to a highway across the Arizona desert and that's where things turned cartoonish.

The dells 

I must report that Roadrunner is disappointingly smaller than I'd imagined and extremely camera-shy but Wile E Coyote is indeed prone to disaster and sadly most often seen squashed on the road.  The Saguaro cacti are weirdly wonderful and apparently it's about seventy-five years before they put out a second finger - no wonder they point defiantly skywards!  The classic three-finger image would be approximately two-hundred years old and inside that green, prickly, juicy-looking exterior I'm told there's a skeleton as hard as a regular tree trunk.  It took a bit of time to get my eye in for the desert but gradually I could pick out and enjoy the amazing variety of cacti and grasses, the beautiful range of subtle, soft colours and stark, weird shapes.

Seguara cactus

Other roadside cacti

Statement entrance...

We have a rest day in Yuma when we'll be rejoined by Isabelle, hurrah, this time with her partner Pascale, taking the French Connection to a noisy six, and five guys variously from the U.S., Australia and Germany.  We then continue south to cross the Mexican border, the U.S. done and dusted and just three thousand kilometres to go.  I'm looking forward to hanging close to the coast down the Baja California - it's been a long time since we saw the sea.

Next post from Mexico!

So long

Viv x