General MTB – Page 27 – The Ramblings of MTBBill

An incredible ride at Palm Canyon

What exactly makes an Epic? Wither it is online or recounting the days adventure at the trailhead, the question comes up quite routinely. Difficultly, length, scenery, conditions, the variables in the equation are numerous and subjective. The Palm Canyon trail fits just about everyone’s definition of an epic. It is a big classic desert ride than can be brutal for the ill-prepared or in the wrong conditions. I’ve done this ride a whole bunch of times and have the checklist of extra stuff to bring pretty much tattooed on my brain. There is something about the misery from forgetting this kind of stuff in the past that files that stuff in a mentally easy spot to find.

That ready file was opened up Monday afternoon on the drive back home from our Christmas travels when the phone rang. “Hey Bill, what do you think about doing Palm Canyon tomorrow? Hold on a second…. Hey Honey, do you mind if I do an all-dayer tomorrow? …..Dude, I’m down, how does 7:30am at the Von’s parking lot sound? … Sweet! See you then.” That was all the planning involved for this ride. Both Bill O’Neil and I have been on enough rides and trips together to know the drill. Now lets get to that checklist.

O-Dark:30 came O’Damnearly and I was headed towards Palm Springs much earlier than my body would have liked. There was sugar and caffiene in ample supply on the drive. I was taking the “country” route which took me past the upper trailhead near Pinyon Crest on Highway 74. It was a mighty brisk 37 degrees when I went by there. A made a mental note to give the “fellows” a break and change into the bike gear at the bottom. Neither Bill or I were able to rustle up any of the usual suspects for the ride on short notice so it was just Bill and I headed back up the mountain after shuffling stuff around between trucks. It had been two years since either one of us had done this ride so I was stoked. Bill had never done the Pinyon Flats trail and it had nearly been five years since I had last done that trail so we opted to start from Pinyon Flats vice the Palm Canyon trailhead proper.

It addition to being brisk, there was a biting breeze but it was otherwise an exceptionally pretty day. Layered up we set out. I had nearly forgotten how flowy and swoopy Pinyon Flats is in most spots. I was having so much fun, I did not even pull the camera out. Once we met up with the Palm Canyon trail, one thing became blissfully obvious. The trail conditions were simply the best I have ever seen. The rains had packed the soil and enough moisture remained to provide both great traction with no additional drag on the tires. Mother Nature had served up some downright sexy dirt.

Killer trail conditions and an exceptionally clear day with the temperatures somewhere between cool and mild is what continued to develop as the day went on. With just the two of us, we were not burning any daylight on regroups and other delays that typically scale up with the group size. We were not really hammering, just flowing along taking advantage of the wonderful conditions. Before long we were at the bottom of Dry Wash. A three-mile sandy climb awaited us. While chilling here it was nice to realize that barring some misadventure we had a huge daylight buffer now. The ride up until now had been so awesome that I could have cared less if I had to walk nearly all of the next three miles if the sand sucked.

The sand did not suck. The dry wash was also in the best shape I had ever seen it and for the most part completely rideable. You still had to look for the firm lines in the sand but the wash was not in its usual death march form. After the wash it was time for the Hahn Buena Vista trail after a break at the dozer. Once again the trail conditions were incredible. The camera remained packed away as nearly all things must yield to the sirens song of tires holding their line through flowy downhill goodness.

After the giggling like school boys descent we payed back some elevation up the Catherdral Canyon and then over to the saddle at the Wildhorse and Claire Burgess trail junction. There was a good dose of fatigue set in at this point and the breaks came a little more often. It was all good as there are far worse things to do than stopping and smelling the flowers around here.

I love the Wildhorse trail, the plummeting elevation drop on either side the ridge top section this trail make for some splendid views. There is also a mental boost of seeing your destination below. It is much better seen in person than described.

The ubiquitous trusty steed shot from the peak on Wildhorse with San Gorgorino is in the distance. It had been sometime since the Spider had seen some trail love so it was called into action today. It was certainly the correct weapon of choice today. Man I love this bike, such a wonderful XC machine.

After dropping the steep switch back section of Wildhorse we worked our way through the Goat Trails and soon rolled back down to the lower trail. What exactly makes an epic? There was no debating that question this afternoon, all the variables of that equation were scattered across the 30 miles of awesomeness countryside that lay behind us. There was nothing do now but celebrate the Palm Canyon Epic.

Golden Eagle

This pasy weekend I ventured about as far as I am willing to travel for a single day ride. The Golden Eagle Trail is on Liebre Mountain about 60 miles north of downtown LA. It is a long haul from San Diego. Why drive that far? Well is a really awesome trail and with the recent snow and rain, the conditions should be prime. So I was up at O-Damn Early and headed north.

After meeting up with Bill O’Neil in the LA area continued onto the trail. We mulled over some kind of epic shuttle but our shuttle vehicle was acting a little flaky so we opted for the out-and-back option.

It was a rather brisk start when we started the climb up the singletrack, but it did not take long to get warmed up. Most of the main climb up onto the mountain is on its north slope and offered some shelter from the morning breeze. The predominate ground cover on the north slope was this incredibly green grass that reminded me on an oversaturated photo. Simply incredible. What was not incredible was my climbing speed. Maybe it was too much breakfast, snacks and coffee on the drive up here but I was having “issues”. By the time I made it up onto the ridgeline I was feeling rather sick and something bad was about to happen. It was one of those feelings that creates uncertainity about what should be pointed where. After some gastrointenstinal “adjustments” I started to feel better and we continued.

Once up on the ridgeline we did quite a bit of rolling up and downs with each undulation gathering a little elevation for us. The trail not technical to speak of, just sweeting flowing goodness.

There were patches of snow here and there as we cruised along that for the most part were rideable. Some of the patches were as deep at six inches which offered some challenges to keep going and maintaining control. After handling a bunch of these patches I got pretty complacent with the stuff, hitting them with more and more speed. One particuarly small looking patch decided to refocus my attention as I got bit sideways in the patch. Upon leaving the patch and suddenly regaining traction, I aburptly switched from out-of-control cyclist to amateur geologist. FYI, there are much easier ways to take soil samples.

Soil samples aside, we had a great time on the ridgeline. Once the Golden Eagle trail ends you can continue along the ridge on a fire road and explore around a bit. We did this for a while until turning around. The return leg was really cool as there was more down than up along the ridge. The final segment is all downhill and it simple rocked. The conditions just don’t get any better. The trail in this section was incredible with the perfect balance between traction and speed. This trail is also open to motos so most of the turns have berms which made for some insanely fast turns. Bottomline – We ripped down this section back to the truck!

I Love the Yellow Snow!

What a great couple of rides I had this weekend. I took Friday off to show my bud Matt one of my favorite around around Idyllwild.

We started off my dropping a truck off at Herkey Creek and then continuing on up through Idyllwild to the top of the Ernie Maxwell trail. This trail sees a lot of hikers on the weekend to the point that they can kill your “flow buzz”. But on this Friday morning there were only a couple of hikers to be seen and singletrack bliss is about the best way to describe the descent.

After Ernie, the fireroad climb up to the South Ridge trail wipe the smile off our face but the views from the top were worth it. There was a singnificant marine layer to the west but Santiago and Mojeska peaks in the Santa Ana Mountains were easily seen peeking up on the horizon.

From here we dropped into the May Valley area. Despite the dry and some what loose conditions there was much grinning and lots of whoops and hollers.

The fall colors were really awesome up here with vibrant yellows on the trees and the various diminishing shades of red to brown leaf litter on the trails. We had an awesome time checking out on the trails in the upper area until we started to feel some cookage in the legs. After that we hooked into the Herkey Creek race course and rode towards the sounds of tiny bubbles in brown bottles below. Matt went off to find a camping spot for a Mega Palm Canyon Epic the following day while I went back to San Diego to play Dad on Saturday.

Sunday I met up with some of my riding buds that I have not in quite a few moons. Bill, Billy, and Cliff. Yep, three Bills and a Cliff, it already sounds like an epic in the making. Our plan was to take the SART and from South Fork campground to Mentone. After dropping a truck off down below at 8AM we were heading up the mountain and decided to go a bit bigger. We continued past South Fork and started up in the mountains near Big Bear. (Yes, I’m being vague for a reason 😉 ) . The temps were nice and the air was thin.

After heading up our bonus mileage, we connected up with SART at South Fork and proceed along our or orginally intended route. I the colors of falls were impressive through here. There were several sections where a good breeze was blowing the leaves off the trees and it looked like a gentle snow storm of giant yellow flakes coming down onto the trail. Blissful moments for sure.

We came across a group of 20 plus riders from SocalTrailriders.org at Glass Road, but besides that we pretty much had the trails to ourselves for the day.

The SART from Glass Road to Middle Control road was a good as I have always remembered it. We have all ridden this trail quite a few times so we all got into our own groove and just rolled. This is such good trail.

Once at Middle Control road we decided to take the road up to the Post Office to grab some snacks and liquids for the rest of the trip. We were all feeling it on the climb. With Cliff being the sole single-speeder in the group today he obviously got up to hill before us. This pictures pretty much how we all felt at this point.

The consenus was that the little break at the Post Office did not do any us any good as we were all feeling a little stiff as we headed out to hook up with the SART again. Beyond this point it was new trail for all of us. There was bit more climbing that I expected in this section but the views were pretty killer.

After what seemed like a long time of climbing, things finally turned downhill. The technical factor and exposure went up in some spots as well. I don’t have much in the way of pictures beyond this point as we were having too much freaking fun to stop.

We did not leave much of the day behind once we got to the bottom. For those that like numbers, we knocked out about 2,500 feet of climbing and 7,500 feet of descending over 34 miles. For me a better measurement is that my soul was full and my body was drained. Here is a view of the remains of the day on our way back to fetch the upper truck.

I have enjoyed lots of new dirt away from home over the course of this year, but getting on new stuff near home turf was a real treat.

Back to Hitting the Local Stuff

I got back from Japan a couple of weeks ago and have been taking it easy for the most. Enjoying the “normal” things in my life like the kid’s hockey games, practice, honey-dos, etc…. Oh, and I managed to break my FN left big toe just strolling through the house. So not much in the way of blogging about mountain biking. But I been squeaking in some ride here here and there.

Before the toe breakage, I met up with one of the usual suspects at one of the usual suspect spots for some playtime on the rocks. After not riding here for over six months, the rocks and all the moves looked bigger. I’m going to have to repolish my game in this area.

Just a couple of days ago, I tested out the toe on ride through Calvera with my youngest son, Jake. While the toe was mildly a pain, it is okay to ride with.

What I was really stoked about was how well Jake was hanging. I rode at around 90% of my normal pass and he was right there the whole time. We did not do a whole lot of stopping either, just riding.

Kids never seem to amaze me at the rate at which they progress. We had a really good time out there and we got in around 12-14 miles all together. It was a good day to be a Dad and on a bike.

“Taiiku no hi” Ride

This past Monday was Columbus day in the United States, but I’m not in the States. Lucky for me Monday was also the Japanese Holiday of “Taiiku no hi” which is “Health-Sports Day”. What better way to celebrate that than a bike ride.

Fall is happening here. The summer heat is gone and the cooler temps of fall have taken over. There are no huge splash of colors just yet but you can tell that mother nature is dusting off her brushes and shaking the paint cans.

The closest mountain to town is Yumihari. I have been on most of the flanks of this mountain and have found some stuff to ride in all those areas. The place suffers from little use and even less maintenance. This place would be incredibly awesome if there were enough riders to keep this place debrushed. I was focusing on the southern area today and was quite pleased with what I found and that it is seeing some use. One such trails was an awesome benchcut along a ruggedly steep hill side.

I eventually found my way over to what I was looking for. There is a large statue that you can see from town perched up along the ridgeline that I had been eyeing from work for a couple of weeks now. This thing is huge. At least 20 feet high and it sets top of 20 foot raised base. This was a great spot for some snacks so I enjoyed them while taking in some of the views.

There was an old couple there tending to the grounds. Eventually the husband and I struck up a conversation which was a mixture of my bad Japanese, his bad English and a healthy dose of International Charades. From the jest of the conversation, the man was 70 years old and his father made the sculpture. He was very proud of his father’s work. He was also proud of the fact his wife was much younger than him (only in her 50s). The wife snickered at this and gave him a gentle slap on the arm. While I did not catch what see said, the facial expressions translated to something along the lines of “You Dirty Old Fool”. While he looked old, he was mighty healthy and was doing some significant work like cutting grass, trimming back branches, etc… I hope to be that spry when I am his age. You can tell they loved and cared for this place. After a bit more broken chit-chat over a can of coffee he gave me, I was on my way. After such a nice little life enriching experience I could have called it a day right then and have been quite happy.

Lucky for the me the old man had “Charaded” me some more information on trails, so settting off from the shrine, I did some more snooping around.

What the old man had pointed to was a really cool bit of trail where you descend down along a mostly steep ridgeline through a forest of mixed bamboo and hardwoods. It was a pretty fun descent with some scary bits thrown in when things got rocky and really steep.

After this I climbed back up the mountain and hit some one the loops I have done several times which put me back onto the side of the mountain I wanted to be on. After another rather technical descent I popped out into another neighborhood. From here I zipped along a series of narrow twisting sidewalks that descended the rest of the way down the mountain back into town. I love when the navigation calls for anyway that is downhill to get “home”. I might get another ride or two in before I leave Japan but if not this would be a downright cool closer ride.

Pre-SDMBA meeting La Costa Playtime and Photo Geekage

Last night was the monthly San Diego Mountain Biking Associationmeeting that was held at REI in Encinitas. Before the meeting a handful of decided to get in a quick spin at the Rancho La Costa Preserve. I got there quite a bit early so I tinkered with a new camera gadget that I have modified for use with a mountain bike. It is a RF remote shutter release that has a range of over 100 feet. The remote is a bit on the bulky side for using while you are riding as it could not be mounted on the handlebar in an easy to reach spot. After some geekage, soldering and a bit of trial and error I made a remote micro-switch for the remote. This “remote remote” allows me to put the camera on a tripod and then take pictures by just barely moving my thumb on the handlebar.

Here is one of the first test shots. I’m snapping the shot using my left thumb. It was a good test as pressing the button did not detract from the riding.

During the second test shoot, I wanted to test out the range of the system. The camera is at least 100 feet away when I snapped this first shot of the sequence. I am going to do another test later at a further distance to see just how far you can push the range. I also had the autofocus set to servo mode to it refocused as I moved along the trail getting closer to the camera. Continuous shooting mode also works with this setup. The main intended use for this setup is when I traveling and riding solo. While I like taking trail photos, so of them would be so much nicer with a rider in the shot. Now at least can use myself as photo fodder. I may have a couple of tweaks left to do with the setup, I’ll put up some additional details on the gadget mods when everything is dialed.

After the photo tinkering, I zipped back down to the trailhead and hooked with the folks for the ride. It was good ride, but I took next to nothing for pictures as I was doing a lot of chasing.

Here is Gardner Grady, aka SDMBA Vice President and member of the National Mountain Bike Patrol showing how is done on a section know as “Meet Your Maker”. If you think you might me interesting in becoming a member of the SDMBA chapter of the National Mountain Bike Patrol, touch bases with Gyan Penrose-Kafka who can give you all the 411 on the program.

We finished up the ride with enough time to chill for a bit before heading off to meeting. There was a really good turn out and there are lots of stuff happening around the county and particularly in North County. It was well worth a few hours of my time to see what is going on in person without having to sift through all of the talking head chatterbox BS that seems to be so prevalent on the various online forums. If you can out about upcomign SDMBA events by signing up for thier Trailnews mailing list.

Long Time No See! or “Funk Busting”

So there has not been too much on the MTB scene that I have felt like writing about since I got back from Japan. That does not mean that I have not been riding. I just did not seem too inspired to write about it. I have gotten in a couple of quick spins through Lake Calvera on my singlespeed and even caught the SDMBA San Clemente Singletracks Ride. These rides while fun where just not doing it for me on the trail scene. I have noticed I get like this for a week or two after epic riding trips. I have come to think of it as “Post Killer Trip Depression” or “Epic Lag”. Pick whatever shrink-babble works for you but I was coming off some awesome trail riding and was looking for some new dirt to ride in SoCal.

I had not ridden with Bill O’Neil in freaking ages. Well maybe not ages but nine months is a pretty long time. He busted up his wrist really bad late last year and had to deal with a long recovery. Combined with my traveling schedule earlier this year and the better part of a year just slipped by. It was time to kick this “Epic Lag” in the ass and catchup with Bill on some singletrack. The person who organized this ride thinks it is best to keep the names of these trails “off-the-air” so I’ll leave things as that. While you may find these trail segments on most of the older topographic maps of the San Bernardino National Forest, you will have to be a little adventurous to ride some of these bits.

The rewards were certainly there and it was just what I needed to bust out of the Post Epic Funk.

The trail was just what I had expected, fairly buff and flowing. One thing I had not realized was that I had been missing the continuous moving that is so much easier to do back here in SoCal. The steepness of the terrain in the area of Japan I was in often meant that your riding mileage was often broken up by short hike-a-bike sections. It was pretty awesome to just be able to “go”. At the same time these trails revealed my fitness level for the continuous “go” has been dropping off. Way to many rides of stopping to navigate and take pictures. I suppose there are far much worse ways to get out of shape 🙂

Ultimately we knocked off a good chunk of mileage on some pretty cool trails. We even had time to stop and smell the flowers. It is always refreshing to get on the trail less ridden and try something new. Doing it while catching up with friends is a nice bonus. Oh yeah, there was tasty microbrews waiting in the cooler at the end of the ride.

Exploring the Kamakura Mountains

Last weekend I went out to revisit some of the Kamakura trails I have been on in 2004 and also check out some of the trails I had never ventured down before. This area is really awesome and it offers a lot of great trails that range from mild buffness, to scary hairball rocks and roots. Navigating around here can be real interesting. There are lots of trails optons and not all of them are well marked. Even when marked, there is the whole language barrier thingy for me to help keep things interesting.

There was no shortage of good trails.

One of my favorite things to do when riding out here is to stop by this mountain rest stop were you can grab a bit of local grub as well as a mid ride snack. It seems like you are out in the middle of nowhere until you come upon this place. This group of hikers I had been leap frogging around for about and hour or so as I checked out most of the various splits in the main trails while they plodded along.

Yummy Oden. It is mostly different types of Tofu, veggies and seaweed.

After lunch I decided to check out a route that none of my friends had tried before. (Or at least not talked about) The trail started near the mountain hut and went to the Kencho-Ji Temple in Kamakura.

For being a trail to place considered peaceful and good, the trail was more like a guantlet of trail evilness. There were enough roots, rocks and drops to get most riders thier fill of technical playtime. This would be a good trail to come and session all the features on.

After a but of tough riding and a fair amount of hike-a-biking I arrived to the mountain peak above the Kenchoji Temple. What followed after this was a very long, narrow and steep set of twisting stairs.

The stairs lead to the upper area of the temple known as the Hansobo which is the temples inner sanctuary. There are numerous and very impressive statue of creatures known as Karasu-tengu which roughly equates to Crow Goblins. They are considered part of the protective spirit of this place.

The Kenchoji Temple ranks first among Kamakura’s so-called Five Great Zen Temples and is the oldest Zen training monastery in Japan. It was built in 1253.

The light was pretty crappy that day for taking pictures and I seemed to be having a “bad camera day” for some reason when it came to getting a good shot of the temple buildings. There were lots of artists out working on thier craft and I soon figured out they had all the right viewpoints. Thier paintings were much more interesting than any pictures that I was trying to get that day.

After spending about an hour on the temple grounds I meandered my way through downtown Kamakura and back to the apartment. It was good to get in some culture along with a nice chunk of riding as well. If you like to read some more about the Kenchoji Temple first check out this site before hitting up Google.

I love bamboo!

Who cares about the little retaining clip dohicky thing anyway? That is what I have often thought about the clip that goes onto the end of the post used on XTR brakes to keep the pads and the spring in the calipers. I have also thought of these as being along the same lines as “lawyer tabs” on forks. I mean the post is screwed in anyway. Okay so I noticed the clip had went missing a week ago. No big deal. Well out on a ride a couple of days ago it became a big deal. All of the sudden my back brake went completely dead. Lever to grips and no pumping would help. I was also in the middle of precarious dip in the trail so it was “exciting” to get through the section and then get stopped. I check out the brakes and holy smokes! There was nothing back there. Both pads, spring and retaining pin gone. At that moment it hit me that I was a good ways from getting back to a street where I could limp back “home”. I was also nearly at the highest elevation I would be for the entire ride. Every route I knew of to get off of the mountain (I was exploring a new area for me) involved a white-knuckler descent.

Well I was not going to get anything fixed if I did not find my brake bits. The good news was there was only about a 50 yard section of trail from where I knew by brakes were working perfectly to the spot of total failure. Not too far of a distance, but the trail is only about 12″ wide and dense foilage is all along the edges. So off in search of I went.

When I was growing up in North Carolina my Dad and I did a lot of hiking and one of our hiking activities was looking for Indian arrowheads and artifacts in argriculture fields and along the river and lake banks. After tiling and fresh rains was considered prime time for looking for these. It was good Father-Son times. Beside it being a fond memory, the point I bring this up is that you develop a skill for scanning the ground and looking for stuff when you do this activity much. I went into scanning mode and started looking for the brake bits. I first made a quick pass along the trail just to set my end points and see if I could get lucky. Nothing on the quick stroll. The second time down the trail I went much slower and was focusing on just the 12 inches of the trail. I managed to find one of the pads. How can I fix this with one pad? Better keep looking. One more really slow pass netted me the other pad that was laying about three inches off to the side of the trail and was paritally hidden by leaves. What a lucky bastard I was. It had taken about 40 minutes so far and I was not interested in prolonging this anymore. Time to figure out what to use for the post and spring. My zip ties were too big and while I had some wooden matches for a retaining pin, a couple of rides ago I gave up all of my tape to boot a friends sidewall so I was out of something easy to hold the matchstick in place.

There is one thing in bountiful supply in Japan, bamboo. It is nearly perfectly round, smooth and comes in an assortment of diameters. I stripped a piece of bamboo of its leaves and slipped it into place folded it over and the small end was flexible enough to allow me to use it as binding string. Sweet!

Now what to do for a spring? Bamboo to the rescue again. I got a bigger diameter section of bamboo this time and cut out a section slightly bigger than the normal gap in the pads. I then split the bamboo, cut to length and wedged it between the two pad backings. The folded over piece of post bamboo also served to hold my spring piece in place. After a few quick tests I was stoked to see the green bamboo was providing enough spring action. I felt confident enough with the setup to not bail on the ride. I ended up riding about another 20 miles that day. The following day on my way our for a ride, I swung by a local shop and picked up a set of pads, a spring and retaining pin. I put it in my pack so I would have a “spare” in case my bamboo should break. 🙂

“Feeling” my way around — A Nippon Navigation Weekend

The weather Gods showed favor on us last weekend as we had a couple of days of no rain and it looked like it was going to hold through most of the weekend. Friday afternoon, Dan and I headed out for some riding in an area near Zushi.

We were enjoying the afternoon as we had plenty of daylight ahead of us. We had time to stop and smell the flowers (so to say)

Over the course of ride through the area we came to one of those spots were either going to be at the apex of your loop or you are going to jump ship and head for another area near Kamakura and extend your loop. The fork in the road at this junction was at the top of a pass know as the Asaina-kirodoshi. Kamakura sets on the ocean, but is also surrounded on three sides by mountains. They are not tremendously tall, but really steep. For defensive purposes notches, passages and passes call kirodoshi were cut through some of these mountains. The Asaina-kiridoshi is one of the seven greater kiridoshi leading in and out of Kamakura. It was built in 1241 and is rumored to have been built in a single night. We opted to descend the eight century old road down towards Kamakura and see if I could figure out a route I followed a local on five years ago.

After quite a bit snooping around I had to resort to “Umm, it feels this way” tactics. My “it feels this way” tactic has gotten me and the poor saps with me in trouble on more than a few occasions. We were starting to watch our daylight as things can get dark really quick under the foliage of the forest. Just when I was really starting to doubt if I was on the right track, I recognized a trail feature and had a “full navigational recall” occur. The feature is a trail junction know as the Okirigishi juncture, in the Nagoe Kirtoshi pass. (It was too dark in this area to get a photo) This pass was used primarily from 1185 to 1333 to connect the Kamakura and Miura areas. It was just a narrow path back then just wide enough for a single horse to pass through. Today it is still narrow and quite a bit on the burly side with some natural stone steeps that require your due diligence to navigate.

There are a few spots along the trail were some trees were and underbrush are strategically cutout to provide scenic viewpoints. It was amazing to see home much light was actually being obscured when under all the foliage. Below us and in the distance were could see where we were going to be dropping out at.

From here to there took a little longer than expected and there were a couple of trail junctions were some thinking had to be done before choosing a direction. We ended popping out right where I expected (okay hoped is a better word 🙂 ) to and we still had just a bit of daylight to play with. From here we did some street cruising back to where we started from. We did make a pit stop along the way at a small mom and pop restaurant that my friend Ken turned me onto during a visit last year. The food here is just awesome with the kind of yumminess that “grandma used to make”. The husband and wife who run the place are in fact grandparents and she kindly treats us like one of her grandkids. She sees enough of the local mountain bikers that she keeps a newspaper around so that we can cover up the chairs so we do not funk up their chairs. She even helps me out when I screw up my Japanese and notices when I use a new phrase. It is always more than a meal when eat here. I slept good that night.

The following day still looked good and by lunch time I had polished off all of the work than needed to be tended to so Dan and I headed out for some more exploration. This would be another area that I had ridden a few times five years ago and but I was always just tagging along. We did quite a bit of street exploration before finding a route up into the trail system. I had never been this way before to get up into the trail system and we went for quite sometime before we came to a trail junction that “felt” like I had been here before. Riding around over here would be a whole lot easier if I was just learn kangi, hirokana and kitokana.

A few trail junctions later and I knew where I was at and where we were going. Takatori has some really cool technical features strewn about on the trails. The section below is gnarly little root fest and it is also the spot where five years ago I cracked by sternum and bruised up a few ribs pretty good.

The summit of Mt Takatori is the site of an old stone quarry that has become a favorite spot for area climbers. There are at the least a dozen such faces where folks can come and get thier climb on.

The quarry area also has some cool rock features to play on so we did. Here is Dan giving his front tire and fork a workout. Take note that Dan is riding with flat pedals and no shin pads. Dan told this was the first time and months he had gone for a ride without them on.

I have a feeling that Dan is going is not going to forget those next ride.

After playtime on the summit, we set off on another trail that included a bunch of steps to descend, but the cultural payoff is really awesome. You are literally just riding along and pop out into a clearing with this in front of you.

This carved relief statue is around 30-40 feet high and is simply impressive. If you do not say something along the lines of a awesome, wow, or holy crap when you first see this then something is wrong with you. Dan was pretty stoked to see this. After this point we continued along the trail that included lots of steep descents and natural log steps that dumps us out at the bottom of Takatori off the north slope.

From here we worked our way back up the mountain on a easily climbable road. Once back at the peak were retraced our way back to where we started. I have a new to-do list item to go back and explore the numerous trail juctions in the Takatori area. By the time we got back I was pretty much done and spent the rest of the evening relaxing. A couple of days well spent.