I love, love, love, Fort Ord. The trails are so flowy and fun but today they were pretty challenging and not what I was looking forward to. It’s pretty sandy and blown out but the base is very hard and smooth. Not a great combo. You’d come around a corner and find a sand pit. The trails were also pretty rutted in places from the rain and also really overgrown. I was getting clawed by trees and vegetation, whipped by grass. I don’t think I got any poison oak or ticks but there were so many opportunities to. Because of all that, I was riding fairly tight and conservatively. I only felt loose and flowy for brief periods with Trail 49 being the only one where I was fully stoked. After the super overgrown singletrack (that I had done last year at Sea Otter for the first time) at the south end, I ended up taking the wrong trail and I was inside Laguna Seca and on the wrong side of the fence to take Pilarcitos Canyon Rd. (which had some nasty ruts in it). The fence was just a little too high to easily carry my bike over it and set it down on the other side. It was balanced very precariously but luckily didn't fall over. I was worried because it would've been on the drive side and potentially disastrous. On Trail 71, the lake just swallowed up the trail. I briefly tried to do some bushwhacking to try and move forward but realized it was a bad idea. Actually, my first thought when I entered the trail was that this was going to be a bad idea since it was overgrown and next to the lake. Just thought I was asking for ticks. I had a few saves including on Trail 89 where I was really enjoying the jumps but on one of the last ones I was sent a little offline and into deep sand. Came to a stop just in time before running into a boulder. I think it was on Trail 36, a nice flowy downhill, where I was coming around a left hander and nearly ran into a woman climbing. Somehow I stopped in time and we avoided colliding. She laughed it off and I think maybe I was more freaked out about it than she was. Chased lots of lizards and bunnies down the singletrack and even a coyote. My goal was to get my Bday segment KOM that Catherine created for my birthday a few years ago but Emily “stole” from me. 🤣 The forecast said it was supposed to be warm but it was mostly overcast and windy making it chilly much of the time. At the start, I thought about going back to the car to get warmers but trusted the forecast and didn’t. No harm done but it would’ve been nice to have some layers on the ride. When the sun was out, it was pretty warm but that didn’t happen much. I got my KOM back even though I made a wrong turn and it felt like I’d never get to the top. Hope to come back when it’s not so sandy and overgrown.