Slaughterhouse 7-13
Tuesday July 13th,
We met up at the trail head/parking lot at 10:30 am. The parking lot/ trail head is much improved with new parking lanes and a more defined parking/staging area. It’s been many years since I’ve run this trail and I was real surprised as to how much the area has changed since the last time I was up here.
TJ Mike and I ran the trail in the counter clockwise direction, making the trail more of a challenge, from what I remember it being. However the long steep downhill creep was more rutted than I’ve ever seen it, not to say it was difficult, just not as I remember it to be (a slow cobblestone downhill decent). Once down the hill I expected some big gnarly mud pits and rutts but all the recent rain didn’t seem to affect the trail much as it was real mellow going.
It was a really pretty drive as we cruised through the Aspen groves and made our way to the uphill section.
I kept the trail as conservative as I could up to this point as I was concerned about my “antique tires”, they are the original Goodyear MTR’s and I had no spare. TJMike was a bit more adventurous when the opportunity arose and I was happy to wait for him to shake down his rig. (I really like his tires and may post up asking opinions about new tires soon).
Mike has a real nicely build going with his TJ and it performed flawlessly, he can elaborate more on that but from my perspective, it was more than capable.
So on the climb out of the back side of the loop there is 3 lines, I took the middle easiest line, nothing to write about. Mike took the left line which appeared to be the most difficult line, he and his jeep made it look easy with not so much as a wheel spin. We continued to climb out of the back half of the trail when the skies opened up and began to dump rain and small sleet/hail onto us. It as about 12:00-12:30ish at this point and we were getting lightning reports (Thunder) within a couple seconds. We both were running bikini tops so I figured it was best to lead us onward so did not get caught in the trees and stricken down by the powers that be!
We made it back to the access road and started heading back to the parking area. It didn’t take long for the sun to come out and make the trail ride a very pleasurable Tuesday morning sneak out.
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