Prescott: Storm Trails

 I wrapped up my ride on the new Bean Peaks trails and still had time to do another ride in Prescott while our laptop was being upgraded. In addition to the Bean Peaks trails, I hadn't made it over to the Storm trails by Watson Lake yet. Figured today would be a good day to get some complimentary riding in. Flow trails followed by technical rock crawling trails of the Granite Dells area.

Kurt had posted a recent Dells Challenge, a series of three routes in the area. I roughly used the Storm trails route, mostly doing a clockwise outer loop off the Peavine trail. It was only going to be 8-10 miles or so, but I knew it would be a couple hours on trail.

Easy warmup on the Peavine pathway.

A rapid transformation to quintessential Granite Dells riding along the Lakeshore trail.

Glimpse of Watson Lake.

While generally difficult, the routing is amazing and took a tremendous effort to plan out.

Missed a turn, but this dead end turned out quite nice.

It's a magical place to ride.

Sunny here, but ominous clouds are looming.

Seemed like for every rock obstacle I cleared, I had to walk another. Challenge accepted.

Handful of area maps to remind you how little progress was being made.

Granite on top of granite.

Trail leads in, but where does it go?

Slices of actual dirt can be found among the rock formations.

These boulders look like they've been delicately put in place.

Yabba Dabba View!!! (That's the trail name!!) The Storm trails have a Flintstones naming theme.

There were cool rock formations around every turn it seemed.

One of the final overlooks of Watson Lake.

I had about a mile of rock crawl riding remaining when I got a text from Chris saying our laptop upgrade was complete!! Yay! I did my best to wrap up the ride in a timely manner, but it's slow going no matter how fast you want to push.

Back on Peavine, the dark clouds stayed to the north all afternoon.

Same location and sunny skies to the south.

What a contrast in rides on the same day. Fun, fast, flowy trails on Bean Peaks to slow, methodical, technical rock feature riding and pushing on the Storm trails. It was perfect. Not to mention it was almost all new-to-me trails, I may have been on Lakeshore many years ago. I didn't ride everything in the Storm trail system, more to explore out there on another visit.

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