Gallup Dawn til Dusk

I was all fired up last weekend to race Gallup, NM Dawn to Dusk 12-hour. I'm the defending solo champion, the course is ripping, they have great prizes, Dale's Pale Ale always show up for beer feeds, and the mayor of Gallup even comes out to do a lap. It's a real community event...

So we drove the 4 hours over there, parked, set up camp, and went for a pre-ride. The course was hard-packed and twisty, with perfect switchbacks and every hill singlespeedable. Yay! The only downer was that if your tires went, like, a millimeter off the line then you sank into soft sand and pretty much augered right in. My friend Chris managed to break 3 ribs and his hand! On the pre-ride! Bummer. That night we got all our stuff ready and went to bed early.
Then we woke up to this:
Thats about 2 inches of snow on the ground...on a hard-clay mesa. Yuck. It only got worse from there, the day devolved into this:












But, as mountain bikers do, we made the best of it. There was muddy bicycle-barrel racing, there was lots of beer, and when the race was officially canceled, there was the added bonus of watching all the vehicles try to navigate the snot-mud dirt road on the way out! All in all, not a bad day, especially cause the organizers still gave us all the free spaghetti dinner (at noon), and raffled off a ton of good stuff. They did a great job with what could have been a terrible day. I'll be back next year! (unless there is rain in the forecast...)