New Mexico Off Road Adventure 2007

Our annual off road trip out west was scheduled much earlier this year and the destination was Red River, New Mexico,  It is situated in the extreme northern part of the state, about a half hour North East of Taos.  My trip began by flying down to Oklahoma City where my college roommate Dave D lives.  This year his son, James was able to go along as well.  It is always nice to have a young, strong, back along!  Dave's business associate Mark D. also was a keystone to the trip, as he supplied a fantastic dually trailer and an extremely comfortable Ford Explorer as our tow vehicle.  It is about an 11 hour drive from Oklahoma City, so we were able to get on the trail the very next morning.

Dave brought his KTM 640.  Wow, what a fast, and very large off road machine this is.  He rides it like a champ--and it is a good thing too, because if it falls over on him it would take two people to pick it up.  He also brought his  KTM 450 EXC for James and a Kawasaki KLX 300 for me.  I love the new long travel bikes, and riding them is not a problem.  Getting on and off them, especially in tight situations like rocky down-hills, makes for some very scary times.  So I ride the KLX which has about a  two inch shorter seat height.  Even though it has adequate power to get up everything, it  gives away a lot of straight away "motor" to the bigger bikes.  At least I can get on and off of it! Mark brought his Suzuki DRZ 400S , and his Honda XL 600 as a backup bike.  He rode the Suzuki the first day and quickly traded it in for his tried and true Honda.  This is the second year he has tried the Suzuki.  Last year he felt it was not right because of the tires and the extremely high altitude of Colorado.  This year he had good knobs put on it and felt that because of the lower altitude that it would be great.  However, he has come to the conclusion that it is suspended way too soft, and it just does not run well at even the lower altitude.  A word to the wise if you are considering one! 

We stayed in a beautiful cabin at the Red River Lodge.  It had three nice bedrooms, a pull out couch for James, and decent cable TV.  Our cabin was right next(10 feet) from the Red River.  We did not fish, but people were gleefully pulling 10-12 trout a day!  Red River is a neat little ski town and during the summer it appears to be an off road Mecca.  We did not see too many other off road motorcycles, but there must have been over 100 4 wheelers in and around town.

We started out each morning at "Shotgun Willie's" restaurant in Red River.  You get a two egg, bacon, and toast breakfast for under $4!  It is great  eating, cheap.  Places we rode while in the Red River section of the Carson National Forest included:  Greenie Pass at 11,200,  Cabristo Lake, Largo Canyon Trail.  The best, most challenging fun ride was to ride was to the beautiful Goose Lake--lots and lots of fast uphill climbing on a very rocky trail.  The most challenging, not fun ride, was to Pioneer Lake. Riding up bad sections is never as bad as going back down them.  It had the nastiest boulder strewn section.  We had stopped and looked it over deciding to take an alternate route.  Unfortunately, as we came back down,  we took the turn that went  back DOWN the section we had previously decided we did not want to go up!  Riding down hills is always tough.  In this case, the steep drop combined with large rocks about half the size of concrete blocks that stop your front tire from rolling are always trying to throw you off.  Since I have no electric starter, when you stall it is a real challenge to restart it.  That was no fun, but all made it down without crashing.

We also spent two days riding in a different section of the Carson National Forest South of Taos.  It has even a better variety of riding.  The only way in or out we could find was off Route 437 a little outside Taos.  About 5 miles in, we found a creek crossing and a super challenging section of uphills.  What made this most difficult was that there was no chance of getting much momentum before the next very steep switchback.  You then ride about 5 miles up on the ridge.  It was even more challenge coming back down.  We then got back on  437 which had an extremely long climb back to the top provides lots of other riding opportunities.

Our GPS worked only sporadically for parts of three days.  Tuesday was the most complete data.  Our max elevation was 11599 feet, and total climb vertical climb was 8816 feet.  In other words we climbed 1.6 miles up that day.  Our max speed was 70 mph, and our moving average speed was 22.6.  The reason for the differences in speed deals with the difficulty of the terrain that most of our riding occurs.  I rode a total of 239 miles in four days, David and James rode a day more than Mark and I did.  A great time was had by all and I highly recommend the Carson National Forest as a great place to ride!