Singletrack/MTB
Gravel/All-road
Dirt-road Touring
Fat-bike
In May, nearly 70 people showed up for the 2024 WeedSac, a non-competitive 155-mile bike tour in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico. Nick and JoJo the dog put together a short reflection from the ride with photos they snapped along the way. Read their story here…
Words and photos by Nick & JoJo the dog, additional photos by Calvin Burgstahler
If you’re reading this, chances are good you know how to ride a bike. And I’m willing to wager you’ve hauled a bag or two—or maybe a watermelon—on that bike. So, you get how all that works. Instead, I’ll tell you about how a scrappy lil’ desert mutt named JoJo completed his longest bikepacking voyage to date. This was his fourth, and as a featherweight of 15 pounds, JoJo has been running alongside bikes for about four years. His story began not too far from the pine-topped Sacramento Mountains, roughly 50 Earth miles away in Roswell; maybe you’ve heard of it.
While some might say it’s a bad idea to bring a dog on a bikepacking trip, I can assure you JoJo is having the time of his life, and he’s about as low-maintenance as it gets. JoJo has the right kind of tenacity for the trail dog lifestyle. He will enthusiastically greet the prospect of hitting the trail with a series of spins, always counterclockwise, tongue blissfully to the wind!
As JoJo’s handler and trusty backpack burro, I ensure he replenishes all those JoJo-calories and receives plenty of neck and belly scratches. It’s an easy job because JoJo just gets it. He knows how to pick lines on the rougher sections, where to find a shady nook when the “helmetwalkers” are taking a snack break, and he usually won’t pass up the opportunity of a good ol’ creek plop to cool off. You might say he’s navigating the land instinctively, perhaps in the way his distant ancestors might have, be that canine…or alien.
With this as a backdrop, JoJo and I drove from Tucson, Arizona, to Cloudcroft, New Mexico, to participate in WeedSac in May. It’s a lighthearted gathering of helmetwalkers in its second year, hosted by Matt Mason, who is part bike Jedi, part desert rat, and wholly one of the nicest (and tallest) guys in the room. Matt is based out of Las Cruces and has pieced together the WeedSac route alongside his pal Phil over several years of wandering around the Sacramento Mountains to escape that notorious desert heat.
WeedSac is one of those pick-your-poison kind of rides. It’s 155 miles total with plenty of bail-out points, shortcuts, and some seemingly endless hills that will bring grown bikepackers to their knees. I met folks completing their first overnight pedal and folks who have lived on their bikes and the fat of the land for months. Finishing is not the point of WeedSac. It’s more about experiencing the beauty of this high-elevation paradise that you would never think could rise from the white sand dunes and Chihuahuan Desert scrub of southern New Mexico. But there it is, topping out at over 9,600 feet and filled with sprawling green meadows, stands of aspen, mountain maple, and ponderosas galore. There are elk, bears, and another surprising survivor I’ll tell you about a little later.
If I had to guess, I’d say 85% of the WeedSac riders were from New Mexico, a handful of Coloradans, a few folks from El Paso, one from Austin, another from Portland, and a small smattering of Arizonans. Two New Mexicans, Aja and Cal, joined JoJo’s and my pack from the get-go. Bikes have this way of shrinking the world, and I had just seen Aja and Cal two months prior at the northern fringe of the Sierra Madre in Sonora, Mexico, during Ruta del Jefe. Chill, capable, and endlessly patient, they are the types of people everyone should experience bikepacking with at least once in their lives!
Dirt roads made up the bulk of what we pedaled in the Sacramentos. Most likely, these dusty byways were built for the purpose of logging, mining, ranching, and connecting the small mountain hamlets with clever names like High Rolls, Weed, Sunspot, and Cloudcroft. Tiny towns aside, most of the route felt pretty dang out there. Forests sprawled up against bumpy roads, occasional creeks babbled by, and some chunkier sections likely haven’t seen much action since hardy folks were out testing their luck with Model As on the steep slopes. Who can say?
JoJo, of course, didn’t care about any of this. He galloped up the long ascents with his new friends or periscoped around his backpack, reading the landscape through his nose. I think I’m not alone in saying that having a pup at our campsites was such a treat. The first night, Aja, Cal, JoJo, and I moseyed in after dark around mile 60, pulling into the first patch of public land dirt we could find. Besides the general mystique of riding in the dusky hour, a highlight was witnessing a couple of wildlife crossings. Two young elk careened right in front of us and blasted up a steep bank like there was no tomorrow. And one of those giant jackrabbits that could pass for a baby kangaroo was waiting at the bottom of a long descent, its big ears floating off into the night.
It had been a long day, but everyone was in good spirits. We set up camp and began making food. As usual, I took the minimalist approach with some freeze-dried mumbo jumbo, but Chef Calvin was cooking up a full-on meal for him and Aja—a Thai curry with chopped vegetables and salmon. Pups know that patience pays, and I bet you can guess where JoJo had opportunistically placed himself… right under the red glow of Cal’s headlamp, doing his best to “play it cool.” Maybe bears were in the area, or more likely patrolling skunks and raccoons, so we hung our food and trash in a nearby tree and called it a night.
On day two, we intersected with more friends—Danielle, Aaron, Paul, and Don. We bike-frolicked through beautiful meadows together (cue up “The Sound of Music”) and found a perfect spot to camp next to a spring just magically springin’ from a hillside. Paul made a fire, creatures howled, and we awoke to frost on all our stuff. I was joking with Danielle about JoJo being part wolf. Amused by this idea, she sarcastically replied that he was the “La Croix version” of a wolf. Pamplemousse, I presume.
On our last day, we rolled through what felt like the most remote section. Skeletons of old cabins with blooming apple trees gave way to thicker forests and a waterfall tumbling over an orangey cliff. There were some good stretches of hike-a-bike followed by long, chundery descents—and repeat.
It was on this day, as the sun hugged the horizon, that Aja saw a wolf. Cal and I were riding a tad ahead. JoJo was tucked in his backpack. And the wolf was just doing what wolves do. We learned about Aja’s chance encounter at the bottom of the hill as we filtered water from a gentle stream. The wolf was hanging in a meadow. Aja saw it, the wolf saw Aja, and both proceeded to see glimpses of each other through the passing kaleidoscope of tall tree trunks. It made sense that such a symbol of wildness inhabited that middle-of-nowhere, meadowy domain. And Aja, who had grown up in Albuquerque, had seen plenty of coyotes…and this was no coyote.
Weeks later, I learned from my friend Rodrigo, a biologist from Mexico now working in the borderlands region, that there has been a program to release endangered Mexican wolves back into southern New Mexico, and it seems that some of those had likely set up shop in the Sacramentos. I wonder if JoJo picked up on the scent of his distant relative from the safety of his backpack perch. I’d like to think so, but chances are good he was just keeping tabs that his burro didn’t overshoot the scrambly corners.
By mile 130, we reached the top of a looong gravel climb that met the highway back to Cloudcroft. It was getting late, and we all agreed it was time to cut off the remaining 20+ miles and head back to the group campsite where this whole jamboree began. The miles on the long pavement descent whooshed by and were occasionally punctuated by vistas 5,000 feet down into the white sand dune valley, its glimmer the result of gypsum deposits having washed down from the Sacramentos for millennia.
We returned to our cars and celebratory car-temperature beers, later to be joined by new friends who took a slight detour to manifest pizza boxes strapped to their bikes. This seemed like a good idea, so we also manifested pizza boxes from the same local watering hole. Inside, we were surreally greeted by karaoke night with dozens of freshly bathed weekend revelers in skirts and ten-gallon hats belting out the country music Top 40. We had arrived on another planet.
Back outside on terra firma, the crisp mountain air was settling in. We said our goodbyes to Aja & Cal, and they became distant tail lights on their way back to life in Albuquerque. JoJo and I returned to camp to see what stories we could exchange and with high hopes of sleeping in. Good night.
Follow Matt Mason/Monumental Loop on Instagram for details on the 2025 WeedSac and the other events he organizes.
Further Reading
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