Trip/Ride Report - China Hat (from May)

[liv2day]

It's amazing how fast time starts to rip by; crazy busy at work and just as busy at home has meant less time to sit down and get any type of coherent report drafted. I knew I had to get this one going as there's another one waiting in the wings; not to mention that trying to remember something that happened a couple months ago is a stretch at best...lol.

On short notice several days before Memorial Day, one of the usual suspects threw out an invite to hit China Hat for a couple days of riding whilst staying at a vacation property in Sun River. I hadn't had a chance to rip around the desert yet this year, so I got a hall pass for a couple days and JP and I bombed over the Cascades.





We hooked up with the nutballs and decided to head to staging rather than hit base camp first. Since it was Memorial Day weekend and the assumption it was going to be packed, we hoofed it down to the southern ice cave staging area and rode out of there. While it was busy and we found multiple riders out and about, I don't think it was as crowded as it probably was at the north end of the area; and all the fun riding is to the south anyway (lol).

I don't remember all the trails we hit the first day, but think we knocked out 50ish miles. Not a lot for that neck of the woods, but pretty darn good given we'd left the valley earlier that morning and didn't get started riding until close to noon.

One of the groups we did run into (not literally) was a group of folks who put on a rather interesting poker run. I'm not sure of the story behind the various check points, but it definitely added some color to our ride as we made our way past 'em...lol. Luckily, we were heading the same general direction as the poker run and didn't have any 2-way issues; and chose to bypass one section to get ahead of all their dust.