Mountain biking ride turned Survivor episode.
I meant to wright in about this earlier, but now is as good a time as any I suppose. This weekend I followed my hippy friend Al to go take a ride in the mountains. Unfortunately we started late in the day so didn't get going until the sun was starting to blink and yawn. The day got later as we got lost two times trying to find the trail head. Finally we started a pretty cool ride in the forest around 5pm.
We started with a downhill- never good. It was fun, but a little depressing cause you know you need to make up the vertical feet sometime. And how we fucking had to make up those vertical feet. We climbed what I can only describe as one of the most amazingly tough ridges. The switchbacks had switchbacks. There also was no level parts of this climb as one might reasonably expect. At the same time that the sun started hiding behind the trees the 'trail' we were on went from about 6 feet wide to goat trail like. Anyway, I don't know how we walked up it and I could not see anyone being able to ride up it.
Finally we hit the top of this monstrosity and had a decent in front of us. During this equally extreme decent I locked up my brakes and started sliding towards an embankment that quickly dropped off to a cliff. I jumped off my bike and grabbed onto the embankment dirt while my bike went its own way (down). It took all four of us to get the bike, but so far I can say that neither bike nor rider seems too worse for wear (just a rip on my bike seat that I noticed).
The problem that I quickly started to realize however was that we were going down and down and down.... a few too many vertical feet. Once we hit the river and had to cross over it a number of times (ah, nice, now wet, cold and quickly getting dark). Thankfully we quickly reached the road and started another ascent. By this time we had travelled 15.5 miles and me and two others were done. Thus we sent Frodo aka Al to go get our precious truck for us. Two and a half hours later (two hours of that being pitch black with skeeters eating us alive) or so he picked us sorry sacks up off the side of the road.
Point here? Don't take a ride with Al.
I meant to wright in about this earlier, but now is as good a time as any I suppose. This weekend I followed my hippy friend Al to go take a ride in the mountains. Unfortunately we started late in the day so didn't get going until the sun was starting to blink and yawn. The day got later as we got lost two times trying to find the trail head. Finally we started a pretty cool ride in the forest around 5pm.
We started with a downhill- never good. It was fun, but a little depressing cause you know you need to make up the vertical feet sometime. And how we fucking had to make up those vertical feet. We climbed what I can only describe as one of the most amazingly tough ridges. The switchbacks had switchbacks. There also was no level parts of this climb as one might reasonably expect. At the same time that the sun started hiding behind the trees the 'trail' we were on went from about 6 feet wide to goat trail like. Anyway, I don't know how we walked up it and I could not see anyone being able to ride up it.
Finally we hit the top of this monstrosity and had a decent in front of us. During this equally extreme decent I locked up my brakes and started sliding towards an embankment that quickly dropped off to a cliff. I jumped off my bike and grabbed onto the embankment dirt while my bike went its own way (down). It took all four of us to get the bike, but so far I can say that neither bike nor rider seems too worse for wear (just a rip on my bike seat that I noticed).
The problem that I quickly started to realize however was that we were going down and down and down.... a few too many vertical feet. Once we hit the river and had to cross over it a number of times (ah, nice, now wet, cold and quickly getting dark). Thankfully we quickly reached the road and started another ascent. By this time we had travelled 15.5 miles and me and two others were done. Thus we sent Frodo aka Al to go get our precious truck for us. Two and a half hours later (two hours of that being pitch black with skeeters eating us alive) or so he picked us sorry sacks up off the side of the road.
Point here? Don't take a ride with Al.
