Dynomite – Day 3

Posted on June 23, 2009 by Smoke

If I ever manage to strike it rich (highly unlikely given my chosen field…), this is one car I’d be pretty interested in having. Coincidentally, it happens to be owned by my pal Don, who struck it rich via a Dairy Queen franchise. Don is also a kickass mountain bike racer from the 90’s that kept Barb company at the World Masters a few years back.

But enough reminiscing. Lets bust out some airs on the Bog….

Our warmup lap was all 3700 vertical feet of Carmi, from Code 4 right to the lake.

That’s enough to wake up anyone.

Unfortunately for Joe, it was also enough to cause a good strain of his Achilles on this aborted DJ. You can see him about to bail out here. Killer shot though.

He’s pretty tough, he kept riding all day anyway. Round two was a full height Beer Run. Haven’t been doing the upper section that often, but Gabe went out and cleared the top for us last week so we called him up to show us around.

Can’t believe that guy is going to be a dad too. They’ll let just about anyone into that gig.

The other brothers had to step up and do some road gaps now that Joe is taking it easy.

Fruity portrait shots in Ivy League…

Whoa…who’s that handsome devil?

We also got a bonus lap on Drops-A-Lot. No pics, as we were BANGIN’ on that lap. Seriously, bumper to bumper action all the way down. So ggod that we had to chill on the beach with some beers until…

..the sun set.

Can it get any better? Well, there’s always tomorrow.

Rock Oven – Extended Mix

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Smoke

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.

Fel Ci Efo Dau Gynffon – Day 3

Posted on September 13, 2008 by Smoke

Another sunny day? What is this…..Wales?

Richard would be taking a rest day. At least he’s not gonna miss much. We hit up some local high elevation trails that I’ve never seen before, courtesy of our pal Vance.

A nice warmup on doubletrack got us ready for some serious sub-alpine singletrack.

This is actually my parents turf. They’ve been cross-country skiing out here for years, and have a small warming hut very near here (if you know where to look).

A couple of sections of the old road are actually almost technical with the roots and rocks, but it’s nothing like the Shore. the singletrack soon took over anyway.