Junbesi to Pickey

We woke up in Junbesi to a grey morning. After breakfast we started our climb to Pickey again. This was going to be a hard day full of climbing. We started out by riding some more amazing single track and after a while we reached a junction. We had the choice of either doing a long downhill followed by an even longer climb or we could try a shortcut and cut across the ridge line to save us some hard earned climbing meters. We opted for the shortcut, this turned out to be a really bad idea.

We had underestimated the harshness of the trail along the ridge line and we soon learned that the trail was almost not rideable. Still we pushed on. Markus got two flats and had real problems with the patched tubes. After going for about 5 hours we realized our mistake, the trail we had chosen
continued along the ridge to an other destination than our goal. So we had to bite the bullet and climb down onto the very trail we tried to shortcut. After climbing down we had another 3 hour 30% gradient climb up the correct trail to look forward to. When we arrived at the top I was bruised and battered, almost out of energy and water. The house we stayed at that night lay just along the ridge line and the sunset viewed from there made you forget about any climbing at all.