Baja riding memories around Mike's Sky Ranch

So many memories seem to revolve around Mike's.

When Tim Morton wanted to propose to Jennifer, he decided to do it at Mike's Sky Ranch. He wanted to combine it with a bike ride for all his friends. Most of them knew Baja well, so he wanted to lay out a route that combined all kinds of routes that nobody used. That happened in December or January and it was getting dark early. We were tying ribbons everywhere on these remote routes and the dark would catch us, so we realized we would have to shorten the route. We did this for three weekends and each time we had to throw out neat, hidden sections.

Ultimately, we ended up using mostly the routes everybody knew. But it was still a great success, the dining room at Mike's was full of Tim's friends and when he got up on the table and proposed to Jennifer, it was a complete surprise for everyone including Jennifer. She must have liked the idea, because in the following June we did it all over again and they were married there at Mike's with a couple hundred onlookers.

Those old and abandoned buildings across the stream from Mike's were built new in the seventies. They were nice stables and restrooms, but they got flooded. The river was at least 100 yards wide and impassable, so deep that it wiped out the stables and 80% of the old oak trees were down in the meadow, which used to be all grass and where we often camped and had champagne breakfasts, after tequila dinners. Someone would pop the cork and we would have plastic glasses to try to catch the cork, each locating where we anticipated the cork to come down. It got pretty competitive.

There were a couple years back in the seventies when some humungous typhoons came through Baja and changed the terrain so it was unrecognizable and frequently impassable.

Such a route was the one that runs from the power station in Valle de la Trinidad out to the west coast that score uses now. In the years after the typhoons, some friends and I spent a day riding trying to find the old route from each end unsuccessfully. It was not until they put back the power lines through that route and I couldn't recognize any of it as part of the old route except going through the vineyards at the western end.