This is the day people have been talking to us about for a wee at least. We kept being told how bad the climb was up to Flagstaff, how no one ever makes it without walking, how there was no shoulder and the cars had no tolerance for bikers. Now personally, I like to discover things as they come up. There are some people who compare elevations from start point and finish point, and people who read up on previous years blogs, but I would rather be surprised around every bend.
After our late start, we rode the 10 or 15 miles in Sedona. People decided to stop for coffee and other things, so rather than get way ahead, I decided to hang back. We found a Panera-esque place and talked to the manager to see if we could get any donations. Turns out the future owner of the house we worked on yesterday worked at this place and was even currently working. The manager gave us all(around 10 of us) free coffee and drinks, each of us got a pastry, and then they even brought out eggs and hash browns(so good) for us! We took pictures with them. Its pretty common to meet the owners when we work on their house but this was so cool to randomly find them at work the next day!
We knew Slide Rock State Park was coming up soon, so we left for that. The scenery the whole day was incredible! We did some research the day before and aside from the slide rocks, we discovered there was cliff jumping to be done at Slide Rock, something we had been searching for for quite a long time. We paid to get into the park and immediately found the group ahead of us had discovered the cliff and had jumped several times. It was a bit intimidating, but I wasted no time jumping in. It was an awesome experience. I've jumped out a barn window into a pile of mattresses before, so this was a little less dangerous, but still came with a great adrenaline rush. The water was really cold, so unfortunately wasn't conducive for swimming. I ended up jumping 3 times. We walked past the slide rocks on the way out, but we were hungry, and didn't want to get back in the cold water, so we ended up heading to lunch.
After lunch I was tired of hearing all the locals tell us about how horrible the hill was about to be and I just wanted to get it over with. I ended up leaving by myself. The switchbacks were not bad at all, there were maybe 5 or 7 in total, and there were maybe 3 cars that passed me the entire way up the hill. There was a scenic overlook at the top, so I stopped there for some pics and a little break. I ended up talking to a lot of locals up there because they were amazed we were able to ride this far and up that mountain. The rest of the ride into Flagstaff was probably worse than that mountain, because it was getting late and I was just tired of being out in the heat and was ready to be done for the day but there was a miscalculation on the cue sheet and there was another 3 or 5 miles extra that got left out. We had dinner donated to us by Chipotle, so we stopped by there on the way to the host. This provided the boost I needed to make it the last little bit to the host. We had a nice cold shower at the host that night and it was again our turn to do laundry.
We found out that Ellie had hurt her back jumping off the cliff, but she was able to walk and was in good spirits so I didn't think it was anything too serious.
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