Dirt Roads & Dry Riverbeds - Riding Northern Argentina

May 4, 2011
by Dan Milner  




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  Rental cars are not always the most suitable options for carrying two bikes plus gear for a three week trip around the dusty north. But where there is a will there is a way.

The heat is not something I expected up at 10,000 ft on an Argentinian hillside. Ten thousand feet is the kind of altitude usually reserved for chapters in my life that involve giddy forays across snowy glaciers, not pedaling my bike through a dusty landscape with heat stroke snapping at my heels. I look around once more from beneath the slither of shade afforded by my E2's peak, and realize we are adrift in a sea of cacti. It's the sort of vegetation that usually gives a nod to what kind of temperature to expect, but for some reason I never expected it to be this damn hot. We pedal on, sweating as we go and winding our way between behemoths of the cactus world and across dry streambeds whose swathes of sand snatch at our front wheels. Twenty minutes in and I am almost relieved when the dirt track we're following leads to a dead end marked by a smallholding complete with an almost mandatory barking dog. It's a cluster of adobe houses each sealing off from the heat of the day by a thick cactus-wood door. The cul-de-sac gives us the excuse to spin around and head back to the rental car we left melting by the highway, vowing to return next day at an earlier hour when the temperature gauge is not pushing "turkey baste". I smile to think that back home living room windows will already be sporting festive Santas and twinkling fairy lights. Christmas is just around the corner, but it's 35 degrees here. I dip my riser bars around another bend, pushing them past some stunted shrubs and startling a flock of parakeets as I do so. They rise, squawking noisily in to the thin air, an eye-catching flash of electric-green plumage against an ocean blue sky.

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  Nothing beats a blast back down into the village after a 1300 m descent. Iruya is cut off from the rest of Argentina by a 4000m+ pass. Grab a local bus ride shuttle up to it to find some decent trails back to town. Just don't worry when the driver raises an eyebrow at the idea of dropping you off at the top.

Despite having spent some time in Argentina previously, the desert North of this long and varied country has always escaped my attention. I never worked out why it remained elusive, perhaps it was the challenge of getting there (it's an 18 hour bus ride from the capital Buenos Aires) or competition for my attention from the familiarity of green mountains in the south, but either way this region looked worth a visit from what I could see during a bit of armchair web-surfing. My laptop screen had been swamped with the kind of pictures you might expect to crop up in Neil Armstrong's photo album; oddly shaped pinnacles of red rock and dusty lunar-like terrain leapt from every photo and beckoned us northwards. In Buenos Aires we paid our 60 bucks for a bus ticket and sat back to enjoy 18 hours of in-flight 'entertainment'.

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  Trails like this near Iruya are normally highways for hooves. We watched a dozen different horsemen descend from the precipitous canyon edge high above, emerging on this trail that we explored. If you fancy the hike, there is plenty of technical and exposed switchback-laden singletrack scarring the canyon walls around this one village alone.

Argentina is an extremely big country, 11 times the size of the UK in fact, but it has a population of only 40 million, almost a third of which live in or around its sprawling capital. That means of course, vast tracks of land that are largely uninhabited and a lot of wilderness to explore including some of its 16 national parks. We chose Los Cardones park to start our bike adventure after which we'd head South and then up North again tracing an inebriated figure-eight route around several locations that, at least on paper, seemed like promising riding spots. All we need is a little more info on trails. The tourist office in Salta, the regional capital, however has no idea of mountain biking by today's standards, and directs us to some scenic dirt roads we 'might like to ride'. The guy at the car rental agency, though is a little more clued up and as we climb into our cheap, but impractically small rental Chevy Corsa he thrusts a hand drawn map into my hand. It's like those pirate maps you used to draw as a kid; a spidery scrawl of squiggly lines and vague directions to buried treasures littered around the region, a tour of which will mean driving about a thousand miles to complete. Having led sight-seeing excursions for years he's noted a fair few 'secret' spots too; information you won't find in the tourist office and we vow, like obedient kids, to guard the map with our lives. We leave Salta behind and steer the car, it's back seat and boot now crammed with 2 dismantled bikes and luggage, towards the town of Cachi a four hour drive to the West.

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  The little village of Iruya sits the -wrong- side of a 4000m pass, meaning a rental car or local bus ride to reach it. Basing ourselves there for a few of days meant being able to explore the trails that spread out from the village hub, all set deep within dramatic scenery.

The problem with vague, hand-scrawled maps of course is that they are sometimes a little too vague and scrawled, hence the cul-de-sac episode. The couple of the trails he has marked in Los Cardones park don't seem to exist, or are perhaps hidden behind a sheen of heat haze. On our return we decide to ride a 4x4 track that snakes invitingly toward some distant canyons. We have learnt the lessons of the previous day's heat and have driven up to the park at 7 am, assembling our bikes (a task at which we become a little too well rehearsed over the next two weeks) in the early rays of soft slanting light while cramming the last morcels of breakfast pastries into our mouths. It's a magical time of the day and is a perfect riding temperature as we steer our bikes into the gentle climb ahead. We are not kidding ourselves that this is sick, singletrack riding or anything similar, but the red and pink landscape that dwarfs us and the feeling of being 'out there' on our bikes is reward enough for now. All around us the hillsides sit like the palette of a sloppy painter, a Jackson Polak masterpiece of shades of red and orange and green. To each side enormous candelabra cacti stand tall and silent like an army of silent but thorny sentries guarding the hills. The climb is an easy gradient, even at 11,000 ft altitude and a cross wind means the soft shells stay on. It's only 15 degrees when we set out. It will be 30 by the time we finish 3 hours later.

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  The scenery in the region near El Cafayate is so dramatic that it's hard to take it in, but luckily the dry river beds yielded easy to navigate passages between the thorn bushes allowing us to look up every now and then to appreciate it all.

The town of Cachi has a certain spaghetti western feel to it; dust and horses blow through the main square with equal gusto. It's a charming place though with some damn good local grub to fill up on at night. Devaluation of the Argentine peso although unfortunate for the locals, means that you can eat like a king for less than ten bucks a head. The day's ride ended in Angie's front wheel picking up no less than six thorny punctures making it clear that riding here means keeping a good supply of patches and we wander around Cachi until we find the local bike shop to stock up from. There's a rack of bikes outside the adobe brick house-cum-bike shop and inside a tangle of rusted frames and handlebars are piled high, making it look more like the nest of a giant bike bird than a shop. We learn the Spanish for patches, which is err... 'patches', and ask enthusiastically about trails in the area. From the reply we discern that mountain biking as a recreational pastime has yet to catch on in Cachi. Instead bikes are seen as utilitarian forms of transport, especially viable in this poorer region of Argentina. People here just don't ride bikes for fun.

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  When the dry river beds closed in on us, the riding just became more fun, following tight snaking gorges until they closed out completely. When they did, we about turned and flowed the descent back to the car, loaded up and headed for the next one a few kilometers along the highway. Just don't try this in the rainy season.

Having survived the altitude and cacti, we head south to the red rock hills around Cafayate, punishing our rental car for a few hours down the notoriously rough Ruta 40 to get there. Cafayate itself is a town that has embraced the bike: everyone is riding bikes, everywhere. A guy passes us steering his bike with one hand while balancing a large round cake with the other and the town's school gates are engulfed with parents doing the school run not in cars, but on bikes. Enquiries about mountain biking however yield the same raised eyebrows and blank looks. We turn back to our pirate map and decide to go and explore a dotted line marked on it some ten miles out of town that we hope might equate to a decent ride.

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  Singletrack trails remained elusive around the town of El Cafayate, but we found great riding by following the dry river beds instead, riding the concrete-hard, rolling river beds as out-and-backs, climbing kilometers up into the hills between magnificent rock features.

The 'trail' turns out to be a dry riverbed that disappears from view between two enormous rock towers that stand like immense gates at the entrance to another world. It's not what we were expecting, but lacking any other trail to ride we decide to give it a go and take off between the enormous rocks. All along the highway are rock formations signposted and labeled so tourists can stop and stare and snap a photo before continuing to the next one a few miles on, but here, hidden on the other side of this huge rock gateway is a world free of tourist paraphernalia. We are alone.

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  Dramatic scenery is guaranteed in this region. A traverse of the Cardones park on the only jeep track gave us the starting point for finding the few singletrack, river beds and fun features to fill a morning playing before fleeing back to town for well earned shade, pastries and steaming mate tea.

If you're looking for spares look no further than the local bike shop in the town of Cachi. It might not be able to service your Rockshox Revelations, but it does have an abundant and essential supply of puncture patches. You will be grateful.

Our 'trail' then is a meandering flat riverbed carved out between incredible red rock formations from behind which I half expect Wil-E-Coyote to leap brandishing a stick of ACME branded dynamite. We start riding tentatively, expecting our front wheels to soon be bogged down or wash out in sand, but are surprised to find the surface baked hard instead. It's almost like the river suddenly stopped and its tumbling sand and mud instantly frozen in time, which is pretty much what has happened, as soon as the sun came out. Here rain falls infrequently and when it does it comes as flash floods. As quickly as it comes the water recedes and the deposited sand formations are soon baked hard by a searing sun. Gaining confidence in our front wheels' traction we start to weave our bikes about zig-zagging between stranded boulders and hopping on and off raised platforms and railing natural berms in the river bank. Everything is baked rock-hard making it seem like we're riding a concrete BMX park at times. Eventually, with a couple of condors ominously circling overhead we reach the head of the once-flowing river where it emerges from a narrowing canyon carved out of the hillside over thousands of years. We ride the canyon as far as we can until it is too narrow to fit our bars through before being forced to U-turn. Needless to say with gravity on our side, the return leg gets more of a hammering than the climb, and we immerse ourselves in an almost pedal-free play session all the way back to the car. Truly the definition of 'trail' has just been re-written.

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  Despite its 2850m/9400 ft altitude, riding in Argentina's Los Cardones Park means getting up early to avoid the midday heat. This desolate cabin was the only shade for miles, providing a short breather.

It's not long before we start to realize that dry riverbeds are about the closest thing we're going to find to bike trails around here and this realization is hammered home at Iruya a remote village tucked away in the mountains up near the Bolivian border. We've heard about hiking possibilities here so assume there will be trails to ride and as we steer our now dusty and clunking rental car over the 4200 meter pass that conceals Iruya from the rest of the world, we scan the vertiginous hillsides for any sign of singletrack. The little village itself is a dash of whitewashed adobe houses glued to the steep valley side. Its streets are cobbled and steep and like everywhere else the tourist office can't relate to our quest to find bike trails. In fact the official is adamant that even the 4x4 track that drops away from the village is unrideable. No-one has bikes here - why would they - as the tracks are rough and the only way out of the village is either back over the 14,000ft pass, by mule along the river bed or up the vertical mountainside opposite. To ride a bike here is downright silliness.

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  Be prepared for punctures when riding the desert north of Argentina. Our first day up in the enormous candelabra cactus populated Los Cardones park delivered Angie with a flat in the first half hour. When we pulled out the tube, we found seven different tiny thorn holes.

We can pick out the progress of muletrains on a couple of racks that zigzag down from lofty peaks across the valley, but to be honest these trails look too steep and loose to be rideable. They have that 'if it goes wrong, you die' air about them. Wanting to live past tea-time we decide to ask the bus driver if we can be dropped back at up the pass with our bikes. He readily agrees and an hour later we find ourselves setting off back down the rough dirt track for a 4500 ft freewheeling descent back to the village. From the bus though I have spotted a couple of mule tracks that snake their way along the river bed below the road and it is on these that we spin the last 8 miles. Worn smooth by dozens of mule hooves, the narrow ribbon of a trail is only a foot wide, but it weaves its way around boulders and gravel banks in a perfect rhythm section. As we near the village, people shout at us in enthusiastic encouragement having probably never seen such antics in this remote corner of latin America.

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  Back at our hostel we sit down to enjoy a well earned cup of mate (Argentinian green tea) while storm clouds obscure the mountain peaks. We pin our hopes on it not raining, for if it does we'll probably be cut off and stuck here for days. There are worse places to be stranded than in a small Argentinian village surrounded by llamas and coca-leaf chewing locals of course, but rain means the river will return and there'll be nothing to ride. I guess that's the only downside of my re-definition of the word 'trail'. I take another sip of the bitter-sweet mate and ponder the descent we just did and think of just how far removed from the trails back home a ride can possibly be.


Getting there and when to go: Several major airlines fly daily to Buenos Aires. Check if there is a supplement for bike carriage when booking. From Buenos Aires to Salta you can take one of several comfortable, long-distance buses (18 hours, £40 o/w) or fly with Aerolineas Argentinas (3 hours, $180 rtn). Taxis that will carry you and your bikes when you arrive in Argentinean cities are easy to flag down. The Argentinean winter (June-Sept) is the coolest and driest period in this part of the country. Spring (Nov-Dec) is possible, but heavy rains in Summer (Jan-Feb) can mean many roads are washed out. Car rental costs from $30 per day depending on model and length of rental. Try All-Car Rent in Salta (tel. 0387 156 858692) and ask Hugo for one of his special pirate maps!


The riding: Realistically the riding in this region is limited unless you want to spend hours spinning along the 4x4 roads that are part of the national road system. Reliable sources have noted that there are good MTB trails around Tucuman (to the South of Salta province) but you need a sense of adventure to find rewards anywhere in Argentina, especially the desert north. That said, most dirt roads lead to amazing scenery and are often rough enough that you’ll be glad you’re on a full suss rig. Be prepared to dive down dry riverbeds to enhance the fun potential of riding anything resembling mountain biking as we know it. Maps are non-existent; it really is a WYSIWYG experience. Should you want to try an organized ride, then check out guided MTB set ups like www.bicinorte.com.ar in Salta or Mulanegra in Cafayate (tel 03 868 421739). Typically MTB excursion companies like this shuttle you up to the mountains to ride 4x4 tracks.


What to take: Take sun cream and a decent hydration pack (tap water is safe to drink in most towns, though bottled water is available everywhere). Take essential spares (spokes, brake fluid, spare rear mech) as shops are non-existent outside the main cities. Take sun cream as it is hot and you will be riding at altitude here. Carry a good stock of puncture patches too. We rode Schwalbe racing Ralph 2.2 tyres that were fast rolling and grippy on everything we rode.



All photography by Dan Milner. You can see more of Dan's incredible work on his website.

Did you enjoy reading about Dan's travels in Argentina? Want to try a similar trip yourself? Let's hear what you have to say in the comments section below.

Editor's note: We'll be bringing you adventures from Dan Milner each month, so stay tuned!


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DanMilner avatar

Member since Feb 11, 2011
55 articles

27 Comments
  • 2 0
 I had enjoy a lot reading about Dan's travels in Argentina, and very happy to visit my country, there´s a lot of places like that in Argentina and a lot more to discover, there is one place that you can´t missed to know , it´s call The Mexican Mine , situated in the Famatina Mountains in Chilecito - La Rioja , that place is amazing !!! you can see some pics here : www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1788668519173.101963.1313383240 if you decide to meet that place you can contact with me and i will take over there . mail : nano476@hotmail.com
  • 2 0
 Loved the article, Dan... However, I must make a small correction: The Spanish word for 'patches' is PARCHES!!!

Leaving aside the understandable mistake, both the words and the pics have successfully captured the spirit and essence of Salta... Peaceful people, vast, eye-catching landscapes, and too many places to ride!!!

On a side note: why didn't you fly from Buenos Aires to Salta?
  • 4 0
 127hrs... looks like the place, i know its not
  • 1 0
 Amazing article! I agree with Dan! I live in Tilcara (Jujuy, province) It´s quite near Iruya (just 100km). The tourist offices always try to recommend the highlights in the area and they don´t know about trails. There are some incredibles trails, but most of people just hike on them.
An epic trail in Jujuy: es.wikiloc.com/wikiloc/view.do?id=746014
  • 2 0
 Good ariticle. Looks like some technical XCing(somewhere between pedaling and staying alive) through amazing landscapes on high altitudes and thin air. It must have been so fun.
  • 6 5
 That is gnar XC props out to you guys! But seriously you need to get a motor on that bike if you are riding that kind of landscape, I would even thinking of touching my xc bike when i have a KTM 450 sitting in my garage.
  • 18 0
 Real men pedal bikes :o)
  • 2 0
 haha i know but riding awesome washes like that call for a motor! Don't get me wrong i ride XC all the time but i thnk that their is a time and place for it.
  • 1 0
 hmm, interesting.
  • 1 0
 I was going to say real men pedal bikes, but I was beaten haha. Pedaling's the way forward!
  • 2 0
 fine i give up haha apparently no one rides moto around here haha..... Real men do pedal bikes
  • 1 0
 I got you bro! MX that shit!! way better! :-P
  • 1 0
 Engines are for dissabled guys with no legs
  • 2 0
 You still need your legs for the break and shifting. so engines are made for guy who like to go fast
  • 1 0
 Righto, a small correction... since this piece was written it seems the bike rental in Salta has changed. The place that rents bikes in Salta is www.saltabike.com. If you're looking to rent a bike there.
  • 1 0
 wow, looks stunningly beautiful, and very well written! i almost felt like i was breathing that desert air and staring at the sharp rocks-lucky duck!
  • 2 0
 Great part of the country to ride, thanks for sharing the trip and the images.
  • 1 0
 Excelente articulo!!!... un viaje economicamente muy accesible para quienes vienen del Norte. Lugares como estos hay muchos en Argentina. Solo hay que salir y descubrirlos!
  • 1 0
 that pic (4th from end) of all the roads looks like a rally racing paradise
  • 2 0
 Exelent article! and good shots! Argentina a place to visit! Wink
  • 2 0
 that 5th pic did it for me. rad!
  • 2 0
 veeryyyyyy NICE.....
  • 1 0
 The last pic looks great for some freeriding Big Grin
  • 1 0
 beautiful. this is what mtbing is all about.
  • 1 0
 Good Smile
  • 2 4
 EPIC!!! Man is that be a trip for my bucket list! Oh, first comment too, right?







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