Shimano product manager Matt Robertson pointing a new Deore XT-equipped bike back down to the beach after a loop at Cabo Pulmo.
Way down south, at the very tip of Baja California Sur, where sun-baked mountains meet turquoise seas somewhere south of the Tropic of Cancer, Shimano earlier this week doled out the first early test samples of its new and improved Deore XT component line.
Over the past quarter century Deore XT has carved out a niche as the high-performing yet still affordable workhorse of Shimano’s off-road line, and the revamped group sports a few new notable features in-line with the company’s latest obsession with offering options galore.
While it’s hard to attribute romantic ideals to bike components forged from aluminum blocks, Shimano’s media relations specialist Devin Walton gave it his best shot when he said XT captures the spirit of adventure and exploration that is so important to mountain biking. Which explains how we found ourselves on little-ridden trails overlooking the Sea of Cortez in Mexico.
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The man responsible for building most of the trails here is Marcelo Espejel, who for the last five years has run a mountain bike and eco-tourism outfit called NaturaAdventures. The jewel of Espejel’s small-but-growing trail network sits just outside a seaside nature reserve in Cabo Pulmo, so named for the lung divers who once to harvested pearls in the waters off the cape’s rocky point.
These days the pearls are long gone, and the main attraction is the long offshore reef off the point—the last natural reef in the area—but Espejel hopes to start attracting more riders to the trails he has been blazing in the craggy mountains that rise up above the ocean.
Some 18 miles of singletrack and access roads take riders up through the hills, over a saddle between two peaks and atop a ridgeline before dropping them back to the beach after a loose, rocky descent.
Here's a map of Baja California and the inset shows the GPS map of our ride on Cabo Pulmo
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