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.

Evening Shuttle (Around the Lake-ish)

This is sort of part of the Around the Lake route.  An evening shuttle up McDougall.  Nice having this sort of thing available for after work.

We also did a bit of exploring in the truck on the way up.  It’s a pretty long shuttle, so it’s debateable on whether or not to ride up.  If you’re in good shape (we’re not, check the pics), then it’s about 2 and a hlaf hours round trip. 

You get the fresh legs for the descent if you shuttle though.  We’re talking about 40 minutes of sustained downhill riding here, except when you do a little walking up for the camera.

Nothing really radical about the descent, but you do get some nice views of the valley and the lake.

Oh, and the occasional sweaty downhiller.