Cow Trailing

Today, we celebrated the first nice day in Jan/Feb with shirtsleeve weather and green hills that look like Ireland (with power towers on them....this is So Cal after all).

It was a great day. We were looking to tie together some cow trails and ranch roads we could see from the other side of the valley on a higher ridge line, but we never could quite get it done...too fragmented. Still, we were riding on a carpet of new grass and future wildflowers unless the cows eat 'em first. For you folks in the frozen North/East/West, I humbly apologize and offer this as hope for warm days and spring.


Cows are great trail buildings IMO. Being basically low energy animals by nature(lazy), they have a keen sense of grade and seldom go straight uphill, they are wide bodied by design and pushed the flora back a bit, and they tend to eat grasses and such that tend to encroach on the trail. The hoof prints and pooping part is not so great (I offer pic as proof), but ya take the good with the bad. 29ers were made for this kind of riding IMO. They drop less into the hoof prints and trek across the 'tundra' with aplomb.