Bug Springs and Molino

Amazing ride today with Jeff Frost. Been spending a lot of time on the road bike and was really craving some dirt. I have been talking to some locals and I heard of the Bug Springs loop, start off the day with some good climbing and then rip almost all the way down the mountain. Sounded good to me. To start the day we headed up the Catalina Highway, we settled in and cruised up Mount Lemmon for about an hour and ten minutes. It was cool to see how many people were on the road. Saw a group of 20 riders all cruising and talking as the made their way up the mountain along with at least 10 other individual cyclists. Tucson really is a "cycling community"! So after our climb to the Little Bear pull off we hopped on dirt for a hike-a-bike section of stairs before we started descending. To my surprise, the trail was dry, I had heard that it was probably still snowy. We hit a couple of snowy patches but overall the trail was super tacky. As soon as the trail headed down I got a little carried away and started rippin. That changed a bit as I hit the first droppy, technical section. I realized I should probably take it a little more chill since all of the technical bits seemed to be after blind corners or after cresting a hill. The technical sections were amazing!! Like I said, they were filled with fun stair-step drops but also had big slabs of granite and little man made rock rollers. As Frosty and I reached the pavement at the bottom of Bug Springs I reflected on how awesome the descent was, definitely my new all around favorite. We still had a bit of descending down the Molino Basin trail though so we cruised over to the trail head. Molino was a bit different than Bug Springs. It was much rougher and didn't quite have as much flow but was still really fun. You had to be a bit more "on it", to carry speed than Bug, where you could just flow and pump down the descent. After shredding down Molino we cruised down the rest of Lemmon on the road. Glad to have found such a good mountain loop to accompany the amazing road riding in Tucson. Definitely hitting up Bug and Molino next week!