Dakota Uh-Oh

Today we meant to go on a 6.7 mile ride, 14 miles later.....

We started out on a ride that was the first Black Hills ride that I had done (and one of my first rides ever). We opted to take the longer loop for the decent rather than the shorter one I had taken before. Let me also mention that the rides in the Black Hills are less maintained and marked than we are used to. There are also generally many 'free-style' trails branching off and back on for whatever reason. So we come to a fork in the road, after contemplating for a bit and riding a little along each section, we decided to take J's trail as it looked better maintained.

Part way down a rather fun decent the GPS milage ticked over to 6.7 miles, and we weren't at the car. We decided to gamble and see if we could hit the road somewhere and make our way back tot he car. Eventually we hit a 4-way intersection of single and double track and decided to cut our losses and turn around. We turned out to be about a quarter mile from the road on the track that I would have chosen...a road that was quite aways away from the car.

Our better maintained fork in the trail turned out to be a portion of the Dakota 50 mt bike race from the previous weekend. It was a fortuitous mistake because we quite enjoyed the trail we found. Now we just need to figure out how to make it a loop ride.