Monday, January 19, 2009

Vail Exploratory and Conditioning Ride

How does a dose of 1,000’ elevation gain in approx. 1 ½ mile sound? A couple of us headed out to do a different ride today by exploring the Vail area - - in the sun no less!. Did you know you can ride from Vail (near the town of Rainier) all the way to Alder Lake (Elbe area) on dual track – logging roads? (That’s not what we were after today.) Today was about exploring a new area for single-track. No such luck. Everything we saw was old overgrown logging roads-- very steep climbing, and great conditioning.

At one point, John swore he saw single-track (he was friggen’ delirious from sucking wind going up hill), and took off riding after it and immediately (yet ever so slowly), plunged over his handle bars. (Hit a hidden rock in the grass he did!) Well, he got up laughing (way to cope with stress and relief he wasn’t injured), and upon getting up, saw a scale for weighing big meat. We didn’t have any big meat. So, Jeff thought it’d be a good idea to see how the bikes weighed in on the matter.

We took a couple of improper turns today. One went downward for about 2 miles appearing very hopeful. Nope, it dead-ended. Up once more. Pound-for-pound a great conditioning ride!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear John and Jeff,
I always wondered about the Vail area. It seems like the horse people would have been riding up there making single track. Look for horse trailers and the single track must start near there. Check out our blog for this trip.

www.alanpattytravel.blogspot.com

I don't have trail photos on it, but some from breakfast after the big ride in Redding last Saturday. We're in Morro Bay now and I'll ride in the Montanja de Oro state park which has some nice steep single track on Wednesday. BTW, it's onle been in the 70's down here :^)

Al Medak