At long last comes an attempt to finish off one leg of the Maricopa Trail, this time from Granite Reef Dam to Usery Mountain Park. I had hesitated to do this section for a variety of reasons: first, much of it is mountain biking, and though I am a road biker, and use my mountain bike for the canal paths, this would have been the first time in several years that I'd been on single-track, and a decade since my last serious mountain biking. Here is the county map of this leg:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11pM_YsR5eF68XoOSP5vr_tw84vFqUEvf/view?usp=share_link.
Below is my actual route, from a Google Earth map with a GPS track (in blue):
As you can see if you compare the recorded track to the map, I have skipped about a 2-mile section of the Wild Horse Trail. The small tail on the northeast edge of the first loop, before my return to the Bush Highway represents my start on the trail. At the point I turned back, there was a one-way (downhill) sign on the trail that I was attempting to go up. Believing I had made a mistake, I went the other way on the Wild Horse Trail and ended up on the Bush Highway. I took the road up the Usery Pass hill, to the egress of the trail, and followed it west a little over a mile, then turned around, having already done 11 miles to that point. Getting back to the road, I still had about 13 miles to go to get home. I consider that I've now bicycled the route, to the Bulldog Trailhead (the green dot at the bottom right corner of the Google Earth route).
From the Bush Highway, the route turns off onto the Saguaro trail, which climbs to the Granite Ridge Trail. The Saguaro sections are moderately difficult to difficult, as is the section marked in the wilderness as "Twisted Sister." The Granite Ridge section is nice, moderate cycling. There are great views of Red Mountain on this route, and during my ride, the wildflowers were out.
The Wild Horse Trail going west, however, was generally easily rideable. A 10-minute video with views and commentary can be found here: https://youtu.be/VQ27vXvz5g4.
