July 29th (Morning)

A beautiful morning today! No fires behind me this time, as they managed to get the one fire put out and so Juniper and Barnhartvale were both spared thank goodness.

I think the temperature was around 15° or less this morning, as I felt rather chilly at first. I caught up to a group of 4 women jogging east, and while passing them another lady jogger came towards us. Shortly after that, I passed another female jogger and then another group of about 6 or 8 joggers (two males this time in the group) came towards me. At the end of the Juniper trail, I met up with a hiker and his dog, and even noticed another hiker up above the Rose Hill pipeline section. My goodness but it was busy! Not sure what was going on, but at least after that I didn’t see anyone else. I stopped at the tree that had fallen over the trail and it didn’t look too bad, so I grabbed an end and managed to wrestle it off of the trail, and then kicked the broken branches into the bush. Thankfully it was that easy and didn’t require a chainsaw this time!

Right after that, I came over the second peak and a rather good sized buck was standing in the valley below me. He just looked at me, straddling the trail. I reached for my phone to take a picture, but realized I had forgotten my phone at work… Of course! Anyways, I hollered at him, and started down the hill. I was probably about 1/2 the way down before he finally decided to take off… Not sure what I was going to do if he didn’t leave, but I had images of the psycho dear in the movie Are We There Yet?… Luckily this dear wasn’t so psycho…

The rest of the ride was really good. I still didn’t make it up the west bank of Peterson’s Creek, and I ended up dabbing a couple of times on the second sandy section on Tom Moore (but didn’t stop or get off, so that doesn’t officially count as a “stop” I say…)

The paved sections were good, and in the end I had another really good time of 60 minutes again and I feel really good. I think I’m finally starting to get comfortable on this bike, and starting to feel it well so that’s cool! Just in time for when I upgrade to my new 29er… Hah!!!