Ah yes, Day 2.  Time for the real Hurtin’ to begin.  Now, right off I gotta set the record straight.  If you check out Hurtin’ for Vert 2012 – Part 2 of 4 over at PinkBike, you’ll see that Tyler is moaning about "2.5 hour climbs", and "what felt like a few hours, straight up."

Not precisely accurate.  Yes, it’s a bugger of a climb to start off with.  2.5 km, maybe 300m (tha’s about a mile and a half, and 1000′ or so).  Takes a good 45 minutes to an hour.  Then there’s a nice section of alpine singletrack, and then another 20 minutes of mixed pedalling and hiking.  It’s nowhere near as gnarly as Tyler remembers.  Probably the fact that we took a shitload of pictures on this section and wasted a good couple of hours in doing so is skewing his remembrance of the situation. 

Now…back to our story.  When we last left our intrepid band, they were drunkely falling into beds all over the property.  Bikes, vans, and smelly dudes everywhere.

Little White involves a huge apporach, so we took our time over a big breakfast and hit the road around 10.  A couple of hours later, and we have firmly arrived in the BC backcountry. Here’s Richie showing us his Kamloops roots.

Yes, that first climb sucks.  Best to just get it over with.  One motion…like a band-aid.

It doesn’t take long.  Good thing we had some mild weather.   In retrospect, this was to be one of the coolest 4 days of the summer.  After this, there was virtually no moisture anywhere in Southern BC until October.

Not much pain involved with this part of the ride…

Here’s a good reason why it took so long to get to the top.  Nice image (you can see Okanagan Lake in hte background), but they’re going the WRONG WAY!  Lots of playtime on the exposed rock up here.

OK, if Richie is impressed, I know I’m on the right track.  Brother has high standards.

Mr. Simmons ponders his line.

Hi Dave!  Note: he has no idea he’s on the edge of a thousand foot precipice here.

A BIG shout out to Reg for bringing 240 ‘Sners to the party.  Cheers, bra.

Alright, we’be done the climb and a sponatneous monkey dance for a random helicopter flyby (I can’t explain it any better than this, you kind of had to be there).  It’s time to head down to the lake, over 6000′ below us.  First, we have to find a trailhead…

Richie’s like, "I don’t need no stinking trail," and promptly schooled the field.  Wish I had more time to set up for this one.  It’s a good 10′ to flat, and he rode it out wheels down.  Not a huge move, but definitely impressive.

After some flailing finding the route down, we got onto the old Telegraph Trail and began the longest part of the ride.  Tis is an awesome high speed shred through spruce and fir forest.  It’s a good half hour or so non-stop ripping, and with this crew you know that’s a long way.

Then you hit the the rock garden.  Most people think of rock gardens as short sections, maybe 10 or 20 seconds of battering.  Nuh-uh.  This one is over 20 minutes, solid.  It’s freakin’ awesome.  Your best bet is to just smash it out as hard as you possibly can. Once your arms go numb, it’s easy…

After you are just about ready to drop your arms off like a crab with an injured claw, it’s over.  You get a bit of a rest and some touristy views on the KVR.

Now we’re into the regular Kelowna trails of Myra-Bellevue Park (aka Crawford).  The sun was getting a bit low at this point, though.  I think we may have wasted a bit too much time at the top, so we may have to cut part of the ride short.  That’s one of the best parts of this zone.  With a couple hundred km of trail in this network, you can adjust the route easily.

We weren’t so rushed that we couldn’t do a little trundling… (**note to folks who weren’t there.  We DID check every cliff for climbers, even though any place we rolled a rock wouldn’t be someplace that people would bother climbing.  Many of us are climbers as well as bikers).

Take that, Sock Monkey!  As we went deep into the Golden Hour, the fatigue started to make even slightly ridiculous situations hysterical.  A good laugh was had by all at Teddy Bear Junction.

Almost out of daylight.  We’re gonna have to cut out the last 5 km of singletrack and hit the road.  Not a problem, I think we’re satisfied with the day.

The end of the ride.  We rode right into the Eldorado, where we had the red carpet rolled out courtesy of our good friend "Dangerous" Vince.  Vinny used to build all sorts of sick and legendary trails in Kelowna, but has since moved on to riding moto.  He rolls a 250 on log rides though.  The owner of the El, also a mountain biker, sprung for the first round.

Good times on the deck at the El, as always.  Then it was back to the homestead for some maintenance.  You can tell who wasn’t running a Rocky Mountain or a Specialized. Because they (Mark…) needed to do a bit of work.  I run a union shop, so we made sure we had enough supervisors for the task. 

Here’s todays map and graphs.

Alright, better bunk down and get some rest  Tomorrow is looking SERIOUS.  Tight schedule for Saturday, we gotta roll hard and roll fast.