2005-03-20 - Awesome Climb Today my good buddies, Adam, Hotrod Heather, Emily, Pat and I rode from Camp Verde, AZ to the top of mingus mountain and back. I'm usually not much for climbing, but this is one of the best climbs I've ever seen. It was pretty cold for most of the ride and we found some snow at the top (even though Adam and Heather didn't stick around long enough for be to throw any of the 3 snow balls I had made with their names on them). The ride starts out on a some what crappy side of the highway ride until you go through cottonwood. After turning onto 89a traffic dies down and the road slopes upward, and becomes a very cool mountain road with switch backs galore and mid way up is a very cool little town (Jerome). The climb looks like something you would see in a mountain top finish stage in the tour de france. After climbing through Jerome the road continues to go up and switch back and things got a lot colder as the sun disappeared behind the clouds. Near the top there was still some snow on the ground and the wind was very cold and just strong enough to knock the wind out of me from time to time. The ride down was awesome, Pat and I bombed it pretty hard. A couple of the corners snuck up on us and left us hitting the breaks pretty hard to avoid hitting the guard rail on the other side of the road. But the rest where very smooth fast turns with just enough banking to them to hold some really good speed. After fighting some traffic in Jerome on the way down we where some what back up to speed, unfortunately there where quite a few cars in the way that did not know how to turn very fast and did not want us to pass them. Even with starting a few break pad fires we where over 50 mph for most of the decent. Any way fun times, I'm definitely doing this ride again some time and I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind a fairly big climb with a great view and an awesome decent. I would advice going on a weekday in order to avoid some of the tourist traffic that got in the way.

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