Category Archives: Trails

If I think it’s going to be a while before I get to ride again, I’ve been trying to get out for just an hour or so and get a little workout ride in to try and build up a little stamina, or at least delay the arm pump. It’s nice to be able to ride straight from the garage and hit some local trails. If I ride it hard I can wear myself out pretty well too.

Anyway, here is a sample of one of my workout rides. It’s pretty rocky and there are a couple of steep loose climbs, but it’s pretty and the views of the valley are awesome from the tops of the ridges. I wore one of those calorie counting watches with the chest strap and it said I burned 900 Calories, I think that was pretty generous, but I did come back tired.

Well, this ride was cruddy compared to all the others this year, but at least it’s still riding… It was dusty, I got a flat and had given my tube away the last ride, I was sweating like a pig and Nate and Zac must have thought I was going into cardiac arrest so they kicked me off my own tire and took over changing it… or they didn’t trust me with their tools, either way I appreciated it. Then when I put the tire back on, somehow I didn’t get the brake rotor in-between the pads, went about 100 yards and about went over the handlebars when I tried to use the front brake and the pad flipped out and got caught in the spokes… bent the crap out of the inside pad and ripped off most the pad material. Once again, Zac and Nate helped me get it apart and bent that pad back to factory-straight and put it back together. Finally we were able to ride the rest of the ride.

It was a pretty big group. Zane brought his girlfriend, Katie, and she could ride! *Not that I’m sexist or anything, I’m sure there are tons of girls out there that could kick my trash all over the trail… you just don’t see them out in the wild very often 🙂

This is still one of my favorite combo rides to do after a day of work. The trail is starting to get pretty dusty and grown over, but good nonetheless.

Chaz brought a long a new guy to singletrack, he did really well for his first time and Card is a heck of a trail to cut your teeth on. Nice job Shaun, hope to see you out some more!

Crew: Chaz, Shaun and me.

This is some “survival man” shelter on the side of Richards, Chaz said he hunkered down here with his little brother when they got caught on the trail in the rain.

I think I heard Chaz refer to this ride as the “Long Loop”, I thought it was fitting, so I’m going with it. We got up at the crack of dawn to head up and see what the day would bring. I heard a lot of “maybe” when we put the feelers out for this ride, but only 4 people showed up to hit it, I guess some people have real jobs.

Other than a few boy scouts we pretty much had all the trails to ourselves the whole day. The Egan Basin monster tried to get Chaz like it did Nate last week, but fortunately he was able to escape unharmed. Snowslide and Davis were awesome! I forget how much I like those trails. The whole loop was actually really good, but by the time we got to the rocky section on the highline trail we were all pretty beat. Ken hit a pretty good rock with the rear, dented his wheel, popped the tube, and ripped his tire. He ended up having to fix it twice. Chaz ran out of gas, put some in, ran out again, put some more in, ran out again and coasted the last 1/2 mile to the trucks. Ken has the same bike and hadn’t hit reserve yet. We were curious to see how much he had, so we emptied it into a bottle and he still had over a liter. Phil also ran out of gas. I took two little water bottles of gas and put them in, but decided to see how much I had left when I got home and emptied more than 4 of those little bottles. I guess Ken and I don’t know how to get on the throttle like Phil and Chaz do!?!

*Notables

• black tape seems to work for a temp rim strip, already replaced the roll we used.
• make sure you have plenty of tubes on long rides, we only had two and used them both with 20 miles yet to go

Crew – Chaz, Ken, Phil and me.

Full album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/alhill/LongLoopBeaverGibsonSnowslideDavisParis

I gotta admit, I was feeling pretty nervous to ride after getting beat up earlier in the week, I’d already wussed out of going up to ID to ride a poker run with Chaz (which ended up being too good for words I hear), but when Rich called on Friday night to see if anything was up, I decided to give it a shot. I’m glad I did, it ended up being a beautiful day and after a handful of vitamin-I and a few minutes in the saddle I started loosening up.

Conditions were fantastic. Apparently I missed the pic-of-the-day when Tunes went down in the pond in Gibson Basin, bummer. Ranger Dip still has a ton of fallen trees, we cut what we could with my little handsaw, but that trail really needs to have a chainsaw run through it. Some of the logs were fun, but it started being a pain after so many. It was fun to ride with a couple of guys I’ve never ridden with too. What started out as just Rich and me on Friday night at 9pm ended up being 7 guys ready to ride at 7am the next morning. Pretty cool what a couple of txt messages can turn up, thanks for the fun ride!

Crew: Rich, Nate, Zac, Brock, Josh, Ken, and me.

Full album here: http://picasaweb.google.com/alhill/20090628GladySLoop