I Still Have Fun!
I know I haven’t written for a while, but I still have fun…
Today I got out and did a good short MTB ride (18 miles I think). When we got out of church and looked at the mountains I knew it would be fun :)…
As it is plain to see we got snow! 7″ at bogus last night, but I wasn’t gonna ride that high, that would be silly I don’t have studded tires…. (yet).
So I headed off for the trail head (in this case Rocky Canyon and it’s really a road, the trails would be too muddy) it starts at 2900 feet and tops out at 4800 feet, so basically 2000 vertical of climbing. I started riding up and ran into a little mud… mud is fun, but I knew it would be sketchy coming down. I kept going and I actually saw one other guy out on his MTB… I chatted for a couple minutes and then passed him.
Up and up I went a little precip blew through (in the form of blowing pellet snow), that was very fun. Then I hit the snow line. At first it was softer mud, then it got to be slushy road with only the tire tracks being worth riding in… but they were also packed and potentially slippy. Anyway, it took me about an hour to get to the top and my HR avg. was 162 for the climb so that made me happy.
When I got to the top I put on some more clothes (easy to stay warm when you are burning 1,000+ calories an hour… hard to stay warm when your just holding on to your brakes on the way down).
Here’s a picture of the road at the top (this is what I came up).
As you can see, it looks like great fun! It was fun going down, but slow going for the first bit, tell I got below the snow line and started shivering… It’s a funny feeling if your not sure if your shaking due to shivering or washboards in the road… It was hard to see the road due to the amount of mud accumulated on my sun glasses. I stopped a couple of times to put on more clothes, that helped with the cold quite a bit. Cheers to Jen H. and her type for coming up with high tech fabrics that keep me warm when I play.
It took me about 45 minutes to get down the hill (including the adding clothes time)… I got back to the parking lot and asked a skateboard dude to take my picture…
Note the ah… mud on my face, helmet, sunglass etc… fun stuff. Oh and if the helmet looks strange, it is a Ski helmet with flaps for my ears so they don’t get cold. Honestly, it’s probably a better helmet than my bike helmet too.
So in closing, anyone up for a ride next week? ’cause that was fun..