One week in Ruidoso, New Mexico

La Cumbre is one of my favorite Albuquerque breweries

Here I am sitting at my dining room table, a freshly poured La Cumbre Elevation Double IPA to my right, Pandora playing one of my favorite Pat Metheny songs, and the pandemic (and now riots) still screwing up our life as we knew it. I've been back in Lubbock for a little more than a week since my last road trip, and my next one will be here before the week is over. So, it's time to say a few things about my time up in the mountains.

As I hinted in my blogpost covering the Texas Hill Country, I had been able to snag two back-to-back one-week stays for minimal timeshare points. The only thing was, the two locations were really quite far from one another. But as someone who has lived in these parts long enough to know what a long drive is, I didn't really worry too much about the 570 miles that lie between Bandera, TX, and Ruidoso, NM. All I needed to do was drop the roof on the Beemer, set the cruise control, and watch the miles go by. As a matter of fact, it was a beautiful drive straight across Texas on a sunny Saturday. I took some roads that I hadn't been on in ages, and I simply enjoyed the drive on mostly empty highways, getting ever closer to the clear air of the New Mexico Rockies.

Leaving ...

... in between ...

... arriving

My condo in Innsbrook Village was a bit more dated than the one in Bandera, and the lack of high ceilings and a loft gave it less airyness, but I had two bedrooms, a nice kitchen, and an adequate living room and dining area that I hardly used. An outside porch (certainly not as private as my veranda in Badera) had a table and comfy chairs, and that's where I spent most of my time when not out riding. A real bonus was the gas grill directly off the porch. Yeah!

Since the Innsbrook Village is located right in town, there was some vehicular noise--not horrible, but the porch overlooked a residential street that had some traffic. The condos are in a wooded area (mainly pines), yet there were no squirrels and just once in a while a bird. The lack of wildlife was rather strange--no birds chirping, no little guys scurrying around clutching pine cones. Only in the evenings there were some visitors: A group of deer made daily rounds and those semi-domesticated pests just checked in on a few occasions.

With a well-stocked Albertson's supermarket within easy walking distance, staying well-hydrated and supplied with fresh fruit and other goodies was easy. Their beer section featured some nice New Mexico brews. What more could I have asked for? I continued my routine of making fresh bread and eating well, and sleep came easily with my daily rides.

Ruidoso is not a place where one can choose between flat and hilly rides. Climbing is always part of the game; it's just a question of how much and how steep. Since I am rather familiar with the area, and thanks to Locus maps, I was able to put together some very nice rides. Most of the time I started my excursions from the condo, but once I took the car to cut out some climbs that I knew would have made the end of my ride rather miserable. The elevation in Ruidoso is right around 7,000 feet (about 2,000 meters) and I hit 9,000+ feet on most rides--that's close to 3,000 meters, for my non-imperial readers.

I sure was glad to have tweaked the gearing on both my road and gravel bike, with some pretty low gears especially on the gravel bike. On one "recovery" ride to Ruidoso Downs (that was the ride where I got kicked off the property even after the fella at the gate had given me a blue wristband to indicate that I was allowed to be there) I took some unincorporated roads south of the highway and my bike computer registered a 30% to 33% incline--not very long, but it was enough to damn near kill me. On another ride, I actually decided to walk a 200 meter section of asphalted road since I couldn't see any good reason to miss Happy Hour because of a heart attack. A few gravel sections were similarly unrideable. I guess that with age bike machismo decreases and risk aversion skyrockets.

Thanks to COVID-19, all tribal lands are off-limits to non-residents, which was a bit of a bummer since it cut out a few roads that I could have ridden to create some tantalizing loops. All the asphalted state roads had signs advising possible trespassers that they were about to enter tribal land. But dirt roads were not marked, and so I ended up getting yelled at by a Native American that I had to "GET OUT" and that he'd call the cops and that the fine was $1,000 and that ... . I apologized, honestly not knowing that this side of US 70 also was tribal land, and retreating immediately. Seems I have a knack for getting a bit of course once in a while.

My social encounters weren't limited to supermarket interactions and being yelled at by Natives. On Sunday afternoon, I received a text message from my friend Jarred, who had seen my Strava feed and asked whether I was in Ruidoso. Well, hell, yeah, Strava doesn't lie or teletransport tracks. For those who have followed my peregrinations for more than just a few months, you may remember that when Sabine visited me back in the fall of 2018 we spent a few nights in Jerred's "cabin" up in the woods. That's where Jerred and his family, plus Velocity bike shop owner Aaron and his wife, Amy, and their brood had retreated to for the weekend. Forty-five minutes after that text message I showed up at the cabin (the steep, gravel driveway has been fixed so that I was able to get the Beemer up there) and we all sat, properly socially distanced, on the wrap-around veranda and swilled beer. Thank you, Jerred for the beer hospitality, thank you, Jennifer, for that hamburger (I hadn't even eaten after my ride yet), and thank you, kids, for being strong and refraining from hugging me. It was so weird. We all wanted to hug but knew that the safe thing to do was to stay apart and keep disinfecting with beer.

That was one social visit. The other one came in the form of my friend Beth (who prefers to go by Bethany but that's too long for me to say or type, so it's Beth), whom I invited to come up for a few days and enjoy the clear mountain air. Beth likes to travel but hadn't been out of town (except for our quick one-day visit to Palo Duro in early May) and was getting serious cabin fever. So, with a spare bedroom it made sense to share my wealth, and she came up long enough for us to go for two hikes. On the first one, a seven-mile scramble around Grindstone Lake, her right boot blew out at exactly the three-and-a-half mile mark; complete sole amputation was the only option, lest she wanted to take a face-first tumble by getting hung up on a root. Our second hike, with spare tennis shoes, to the "waterfall" at Alto Lake was less dramatic. It sure was nice to share dinners and sitting outside in the cool air at night. I'm glad she got a chance to come up, even if I had to share the homemade pizza.

And thus my week in the mountains went by much faster than anticipated. While I rode about 290 miles in the Hill Country, it was just about 160 in New Mexico. Of course, there was a bit more elevation gain and there were (or is it "was"? Is it a plural? It's more than one!?!) the day-and-a-half of hiking, too. Overall, I have to say that these two weeks were simply delightful in regard to getting out and seeing new places and taking in all those impressions and vistas. Doing all that with a spacious homebase that allows me to eat healthily and stay comfortable is such a treat. And thus it should not come as a surprise that I used some of my spare time to plan another, very similar, two-week trip to Missouri and Arkansas. The air may not be as dry and the temperatures not as pleasant as in New Mexico, but what the heck: I'm sure there will be exciting places to be explored, and undoubtedly the grocery stores will have long shelves with new beers to be explored.

So, let's see what June will bring.

Jürgen