Sunset Whips

Posted on May 15, 2012May 17, 2012 by Smoke

Tuesdays are youth rides at Freedom, and for once I was able to hit one up.

Wasn’t sure how the young guns were gonna fare around here. Hopefully better than some of the wildlife.

Oh, looks like they’ll be just fine. Although this in no way does this line justice, it’s a tough one. Just having the crew even consider it is pretty good.

As we got towards the end, the sun started to go down and we had a bit of a session on the Redemption Compression. Dax got us going with the low flight line.

Didn’t take long for the kids to take it up a notch.

After a few passes on that one, we had another small sesh on the final berm hit into Tsweet Tsu.

Check out Sheldon on the full rigid. Technically he has a suspension fork, but as it’s full of water it doesn’t actually move much.

Like any great ride, gotta have some bevvies in the parking lot after.

Soft drinks…they’re SOFT drinks. We’ve been enough of a bad influence on these guys already with getting them addicted to the bikes.

1st Ride of 2012

Posted on April 19, 2012April 20, 2012 by Smoke

It’s been another great winter, and I’ve managed to successfully avoid riding, looking at, or even thinking about bikes since early November. Time to get back out there.

We hit up the 3 Blind Mice, as per usual, for a Freedom Bikes shop shuttle session. I brought along the trusty chainsaw for a little early season maintenance, and we managed to not only clear a few big downed trees but also this lost nugget.

I don’t know who built this originally, but Karl the Gnarl had the line zeroed in. It kind of peters out after the bridge, so we knocked together a quick group effort and cleared out a new option that leads straight into the lower half of Drops A Lot.

Also, our new friend Jason from California broke his big rock hymen on this one. We’ll make a Canadian outta that guy in no time.

Kelowna Gran Fondo

Posted on July 16, 2011July 29, 2011 by Smoke

It’s not all fat tires and madness. As the tours are a bit thinner this year, I’m helping out Kurt with his shop, and with that comes some support at the “Big Rides” that are currently in vogue in the roadie world. They’re not races, they’re big rides. Like a thousand riders big (and this is actually a bit of a disappointment. There should have been 5 000). Of course, it only took about 10 seconds to run into some of the old North Shore locals. Say hi to Oop there in the Ryders jersey in the foreground.