April 28th (Afternoon)

April 28th (Afternoon)

Well, what blows East must eventually blow West I suppose around these parts. After two days of 30-50km/h head winds, today I got the same wind home but finally it was a tailwind! I'm not sure which hill it was (I'm assuming Hugh Allan), but somewhere I managed to hit 80km/h... Oops! I wasn't really paying attention to the computer (at those kind of speeds, I'm just hanging on and watching everything out in front of me). I tried taking a picture with my phone as "proof", but it is a bit blurry...

Down into Peterson's creek was really quite good (except I still missed the same two switchbacks, dang it). It was quite a bit faster, and yet not out of control at all. In fact, the brakes felt very grabby. I had adjusted them Monday night the best I've had them yet (using the business card on each side of the rotor trick). Boy, did they ever work! It might also have been due to the rain we've had this week which firmed up the trail a bit, giving the tires a lot more grip. Whatever it was, it was a very fun down! Going up was the same as ever, 4 stops, 1/3 walking.

The section through Frolek's land is totally wrecked, unfortunately. They have completely trashed the road and the trails with their big, bad bulldozer... I snapped some pictures to hopefully demonstrate this sacrilege.. :) The transistion to my trail at the end was completely dozed over, and I had to climb a 6' cliff that was falling away under my feet to get up onto it... ARRGGG! This used to be such a fun transistion... :(


I think they drove around a bit today with a truck or something, because there were some semi-smooth sections, but the same sections would often give way to about 3 inches of sand... Ugghh..

Like this corner... I did make it through it though! Took some grinding and pushing in a higher gear, but I didn't put a foot down (except for stopping for pictures). 

Here's the final section I have to ride (on crown land here). On the right, notice the trail? Yep, that's my trail... Now I have a bit of bike-on-the-shoulder climbing to do. The road goes down and that just means I must come back up, so that's not an option. I may start looking into options higher up at the beginning if I think I can handle the extra climbing... :) Maybe this weekend I'll go out on a bit of a ride to see what options I have?

The pipeline section was fun as usual, I tried getting my speed back up to what I used to do prior to my log/stick encounter, which worked well as I did make the 2nd to last peak. Still no luck on the final peak of course yet (1/2 way up or so). The stretch to Juniper was great fun!

After I made it to Juniper, I turned and headed down the hill to Valleyview as it was Taryn's practice. All in all, with the extra distance, it was still on 44 minutes riding time (2 minutes less than Monday's time as that ride was with the headwind).