USA - Day 25 - Blair Valley - Anza-Borrego Desert State Park

This is the route we cycled today

We got up at 7:30 because we were hoping the stagecoach general store would be open at 09:00. When we got there we looked and found a gas canister and all the food we needed to do the Anza-Hapaha loop in the counter clockwise direction. Hooray! 🎉

The weather in the direction of Borrego Springs (our backup plan) wasn’t looking good so we were happy we could go into the other direction!

We started with an uphill section (around 500m in elevation) which was all sandy road. This road was pretty good compared to Fish Creek Wash (which we did later in the day) but it was still pretty heavy even for not being too steep.

Some jeeps crossed us and a couple of kilometres later we crossed them again as they were preparing for a difficult part. At a certain point we came across a very steep dropoff but luckily we soon found out that we were off our track 😅

We turned around and took the right path and it immediately got very rocky and we had to push our bikes. We took a break to eat something and heard engine noises. The jeeps that we overtook were coming our way.

We watched them tackle this section and we continued on. A bit further they were waiting again and they told us they were now going down an insane steep rocky hill. We went down on a parallel single track, sat down and enjoyed the show. After 2 jeeps went down another went up which was even more insane (although the guy going up was an impatient jerk and we hope he got stuck 😇)

After the show we continued on and from here on the road got worse. The sand got really deep and I started struggling. Bart had it a bit easier with his wider tires so he regularly had to wait for me. We made peanut butter and jam tortillas beside the road for lunch.

After this we continued on the wash which stayed in the same worse condition. If I wasn’t sliding around in deep sand there were these horrible washboard sections with regular bumps which made my whole body feel sore.

We found a side road where no motor vehicles were allowed (there were a lot) and we searched for a spot for the night. It should be pretty quiet here.

See you tomorrow!