It’s A Tough Job….

…but someone has to take the girls out riding, and it may as well be me.  Right?

Just another ride on Smith Creek.  Daniella missed out on the Girls Got Skills clinic, and hasn’t done an XC ride before, so there you have it.  Oh, and we ran into John out for his first Smith Creek ride too.

The new trail is getting a bit of a rep.  This sums it up…

Rock Oven – Extended Mix

Sometimes, it’s just way to hard to get people to come riding.  I mean, you get the plans all set for a rad adventure, and then no-one shows up.  I mean….don’t these guys know who I am?  I’m kind of a big deal….

Andrew knows.  I can always count on him.  Every time we’ve hooked up for a ride, it’s been an epic.  Today was no exception.

I’d heard that you could ride into Rock Oven from above, but the info was sort of sketchy. After studying some maps, it didn’t look that complicated, but it’s big country.  We went for it, and with all the flailing earlier with no shows, we didn’t get going until sort of late.

Long story short: a 6km doubletrack traverse, 1.5-2 km push uphill, and then massive amounts of singletrack.

I only went the wrong way once.  Well, twice if you count this time I crashed because my hands were so tired.

Much time spent riding, hardly any spent taking pics.  Here’s a shot of a cave, man.

Standard lookout pic. This is the ‘normal’ high point.  Today this was almost at the bottom.

Oh yeah, Andrew got a flat.  And neither one of us brought a tube.  Fricken geniuses.

Well, it was a tubeless tire, so we crammed a twig in the hole and it wealed up just enough to hold about 10 psi, which was Good Enough to get out.

Well, so long as we stopped to pump the tire up every ten minutes or so anyway.  Must have been the 13th today, with the way things were going.  I’m not even going to talk about the thunderstorm.

The moose didn’t care.

Here’s where we went.  Roughly 25km and 4500’ of descending. 

Outbound Group Ride

As part of an irregular schedule, I do a group shuttle with Outbound on Thursday nights.  $5 gets you all this…

That last one is Glen, the owner.

As an added bonus, I tried out the other line up Powers (finally).  It’s not exactly the “Double Black Diamond” that they’ve rated it at (more like a blue trail with 50’ of steep rocks in one part), but it’s still pretty rad.  I’ll have to get some pics of that one for you soon.