90 Days...

90 Days… Well ninety days on the bike and the bike was on dirt every one of those days. I haven’t yet bothered to count how many days I have had in the saddle since the knee incident and the sudden lack of employment I would find myself in for the next year. 90 days is a pretty good number but I often think about where I could have gotten the extra 10 to make it to 100 before being shuttled off to lands far away and somewhat inhospitable to mankind let alone riding.

The imposed rest over the next two weeks will be the longest I have been off the saddle all season. Five days being the current standard bearer and the primary reason for that was the monster saddle sore that decided makes it’s presence felt a little too much. Monster ass growth aside this little hiatus couldn’t have come at a better time, the bike doth protest. The links and pivots are moving in ways they shouldn’t and making a little too much noise about it and my cranks have axial play that just isn’t quite normal. Alas these annoyances can only be addressed buy throwing hard currency them, which of late have been of dwindling, supply.

In the meantime I get back to the old roots of Arctic field camp maintenance. Pumping fuel and water, burning garbage and sorting out what the hell is wrong with the generator this time. All the while reminiscing the past 6 months of riding, plotting the next adventure and accumulating the much required hard currency for all of these elements to come together.

The tick list thus far:
Joint health, always a good thing
Moab, I can’t believe it took 15 years to get there
Cambodia, not the Southeast Asian nation
Highway 102 with unintended call to search and rescue
Highway 102 without aid of search and rescue.
Discovery of so many unused old and new trails in the backyard
Amazingly good Birthday Epics
The Chilcotins

The Hit List:
The 100th ride of ‘09
Northshore Triple-Crown
Seven Summits
Trail X

The Damage:
Dirvetrain replaced
Rearwheel finally gave up, wheel round and true but spoke-beds cracking
Rear Shock oil emulsified
Cranks worn chain rings still fine
Upper link pivot bolt worn.

Maybe I am going to need more than two weeks to $ort all of this out…

A shameless ploy for a free bike and more trails to ride it on...

Specialized has this little promotion thing going on to be a part of their Trail Crew. I found out about it during one of my daily viewings of the many cycling related websites I click through out there. Something about it intrigued me, it was likely the prospect of getting a free bike and as we all know, free is always the right price. Now I am supposed to explain why it is that I would be an appropriate member of this crew… Admittedly not owning a Specialized bike would count as a strike against in said application. But I did recently drop a serious wad of cash on a set of new S Works shoes and I think this could be one thing that gets my proverbial foot in the door.

Why did I buy these shoes? Admittedly they were not my first choice, and not just because they were 50% more expensive to boot… they just weren’t anywhere on the footwear radar (strike two). But damn-it I needed new shoes and halfway through the season finding anything in my size let alone the ones I truly wanted was proving to be ridiculously difficult.

I had this big ride planned for early August, 3 Days in the Chilcotins in south central BC. One of those days was going to be about 10hrs long and a healthy portion of that was going to be spent pushing my (not a Specialized) bike uphill to access miles and miles of the absolute sweetest single-track I was ever to experience. I was going to require a solid set of footwear and what had been covering my feet and attached to the pedals for the last 3 years had pretty much given up. A lot of serious miles… err I think I should say time, put in those puppies. Trails in BC aren’t typically very long- distance wise- but they will certainly beat you up in no time.

I have been riding off-road for sometime now, 20+yrs, the majority of it within 50 miles of Vancouver and of all of the sports I actively participate in, mountain biking is solidly at the top step. Now I am not on the bike every waking moment, I do work on occasion, but I have pretty much given up, missed or outright avoided many other activities because I have found a new trail to ride or a new friend to ride with. This last year being no exception, reconstructive knee surgery this past December while being a serious hindrance was a serious motivator too, I hit the trails 24hrs before hopping on the table. Apparently orthopedic surgeons believe that cycling is a great form of rehab too and it is, just don’t tell them you’ve been riding something a little more serious than the excer-cycle at physiotherapy barely 2 months post-op.

So save for those enforced 2 months off the bike, mother nature wasn’t helping a whole lot either, those old shoes of mine have been through a lot: up and down the North-Shore too many times to count, Squamish and Whistler over and over again. Many trips to the interior of our province, a trip to Moab 15+ years overdue and a recent 4hr rescue while doing a recon ride (backwards) of stage 5 of the BC Bike Race. 3 years of experiences like that in those shoes and my feet were really beginning to hurt, cramps and such likely a symptom of the cracked mid-sole and with the epic of all epics to come it was time to get something to relieve those tired dogs of mine. 2 weeks of searching and wouldn’t you know it the place I was reluctant to go to first had exactly what I needed but didn’t realize I was looking for: Fancy fishing line-like retention system, high-zoot carbon sole, fancy toe-cleats and a price tag that would make Bill Gates blush. They were a perfect fit; the only thing missing was the pumpkin that would take me to the big dance.

So since that purchase, in the last month I have had the chance to put those shoes through the paces. A couple more rides in Squamish on top of the regular rides and a little warm-up hike-a-bike somewhere in my backyard of the North-Shore. Not to mention those three days in the aforementioned Chilcotins where I was fortunate enough to experience the amazing Lorna Lake- Deer Pass combo. The quick and dirty is that while they are definitely not the best footwear to be walking 3+ hours up a mountain slope with, my feet have never been so grateful to be so well supported over those 10+ hrs.

So there you have it… Consider this my official application for the trail crew. A nice new bike to hop aboard, new friends to meet and hopefully new trails to ride, sounds like a great opportunity. I’ll bring my new shoes.

Words can't describe... But I will try. Pt 1

It was a completely innocuous moment but it set in motion the best adventure I have been a part of in sometime. I had just stepped off one of the baggage pods of my helicopter onto a dead flat expanse of wild grass when my knee collapsed. The fact that the knee did collapse wasn’t uncommon for me, I had torn the ACL for a second time a few years before and at times it had a habit of dislocating. This was different however, it went a new direction and there was sudden acute pain followed immediately by swelling. My breakthrough season of flying had just come to a sudden halt with a freshly torn medial meniscus on top of the ruptured ACL. Surgery and prolonged rehab was definitely going to be a part of my immediate future.

Fortunately cycling is a fairly stable and low impact form of exercise and one of the best ways to recover as well as cope with a knee injury. The swelling had subsided substantially as well as most of the pain and it wasn’t long before I was aboard my bike and a full year of exploration would ensue.

Cambodia, that’s where it began. It was a little notation in the blog of a SRAM sponsored athlete. I don’t recall how it was that I ended up on this particular blog but something struck me about a particular rider profile. “Favorite trail: Cambodia, somewhere in Vancouver”. The North Shore of Vancouver is littered with trails on three mountains to choose from. There are dozens of well-known trails as well as an almost equal number of the not so well known and having ridden in this area for 20+ years Cambodia fit into the not so well known.

Believe it or not the North Shore can be a pretty boring place to ride. While being world renowned for the extreme nature of the riding here the trails are generally short in nature and apart from pedaling to the trail heads there is little more than coasting and holding on till you get to the bottom after you drop-in. Now I like technical trails as much as the next guy but there are no real epics on any one of the local mountains. Save for the Bridal Path on Mount Seymour the Shore lacks areas of serious pedaling, having to actually go uphill for much more than a few meters on any of the trails here is rare indeed. When found the efforts are usually rewarded with the North Shore equivalent of the Holy Grail: Loam, that highly organic soft aromatic soil that provides tremendous traction as well as incredible forgiveness. Loam is also quite rare because of the ease of car access to a number of the more popular trails. The easier the access by car or otherwise the sooner it becomes a rutted rooted mess and if real popular will eventually resemble a cobbled country road in Europe.

Your perspective of a trail changes so much when not perched on two wheels, that much more when walking uphill. Not long after returning home from the injury the first potential epic would be found. Urban Warfare is a name Sonny and I had given to a link-up of a number of trails on Cypress Mountain many of which that are not mapped. Sonny is one of my most frequent riding buddies and while Fromme mountain is in my backyard in North Vancouver, Cypress makes up his West Vancouver property extension. Over the wetter parts of the season and to mix things up a bit he and I often hike the same trails we ride but on the lookout with keen eyes for the subtleties of trails we may not have descended before or even noticed for that matter. Baghdad, so named for the “Green Zone”, a tremendously lush mossy spot that was lit up by the afternoon sun the day we found it was just such a treasure found on a little walk. Baghdad wasn’t a new trail but it also wasn’t seeing any traffic whatsoever which was amazing considering it’s entrance is literally one whole bike length from a reasonably well traveled intensely difficult trail for which Vancouver is famous for. With historic trails such as Blind Skier, the short lung busting climbs on the Antagonizer and a rip down the Slippery Canoe as a lead in, Baghdad and 4 other trails would make a ride that would last nearly an hour and descend almost 2000’. All too accessible by car but an option of a climb up an old classic called the BLT, so named in the late 80’s for the Boulders Logs and Trees that one would be subjected too either climbing or descending what is essentially an access road for the power lines that climb the west side of the mountain, it could add another hour to the experience if one is so inclined. As accessible as many of these trails are, a couple of these trails see little use because of the climbs. Who in there right minds would ride up a trail on 40+lb bikes? Fortunately not very many and as a result there remains a little haven of loamy single-track oh so close to some of Cypress’s most popular descents. Couple that with that climb up the BLT and my faith in finding a little epic on the North Shore would be restored.

Cambodia however still remained elusive. Donna, my source for single-track goodness in Sea to Sky country knew said sponsored SRAM athlete and he wasn’t giving up any information regarding its existence. The rest of the summer of 2008 would include multiple rides on most of the classics trails on all three mountains. I returned briefly north to Yellowknife for work but due to an open compensation claim a result of that knee injury I soon found myself back at home. Nothing to do but wait for the claim to sort itself out and fortunately due to lack of pain associated with the injury a hell of a lot more riding and exploring would be done in the coming months. The only thing to give out before my knee would again was the bike…

Lets Go Play!

30 minutes and counting before Scotty shows up with the truck.

Next stop: Bralorne. A couple of days of warm up rides around the Tyaughton area before the big Lorna Lake-Deer Pass-Gun Creek Epic.

I swear it's back this time!

Many promises of getting back to updating the old blog but this time I mean it. The last year has been one grand adventure and I have many tales to tell. Many trails have been ridden, I mean many and with that was mass consumption of ale.

The bulk of the adventure started last July when I had a little incident disembarking my helicopter. Since then I have not worked a day in my chosen career due to any number of circumstances-Damn collapse of the economy- and a stint under the knife in December to repair a ruptured ACL... Again.

Full disclosure:

This desire to relay the adventures is also a shameless ploy to acquire free stuff and continue to do what I love best.

Just to get out there and ride.

So stay tuned... 24hrs from now I will be in the Chilcotins on the latest of my great bike ride hit list, which has also included a trip to Moab that was 20 years in the waiting.