The Ramblings of MTBBill

SDMBA Day at Calavera – FEB 28th

Put this on your calender folks. If you not being riding/following Calvera lately, there is lots of activity going on, both good and not-so-good, with this area. The CA Dept of Fish and Game has not exactly be a “welcoming with open arms” kind of group towards mountain bikers so our community showing up in good numbers will go a long way towards establishing a good relationship with them here. Come on out, do a little trailwork and then do a little riding.

The below information is from Erik Trogden, the North County Coastal Liaison with the San Diego Mountain Biking Association.

February 28th at Calavera

This is an important opportunity for mountain bikers, hikers, and others to come together for the common cause of taking care of our precious open spaces. Let’s demonstrate that we are responsible stewards of Calavera by pitching in to make it a better place for everyone who enjoys it.

SDMBA is collaborating with the CA Dept. of Fish and Game to do habitat restoration and erosion control on a heavily used trail falling southwest away from the quarry; sometimes referred to as The Spine or Mordor. The 200 yard long stretch of trail has widened significantly over time and needs some work to repair damage from rain and overuse.
9:00 to Noon. Staging area TBD. Same format as La Costa with food, schwag and lot’ s of education about how YOU can make a difference.

Erik Trogden
North County Coastal Liaison
SDMBA

Intense Demo Day and UZZI Test Ride

Yesterday, the Intense Demo Tour along with BikeBling were at Daley Ranch in Escondido so I swung by to check out the scene. There were lots of folks buzzing around right from the start and it did not take for the 20 plus sweet demo rigs to be set free with test riders out onto the trails. I’m pretty sure that I saw the entire lineup of bikes go out at least twice while I was there.

There was more than just the production bikes there. There were some prototypes and preproduction bikes to kick around as well. Here is a Jeff Steber science project bike. This is a Tracer with a set of ISCG tabs welded onto the bottom bracket to allow for a Hammerschmit crankset to be used. (Production Tracers don’t have these tabs) This is an internal geared crankset that allows you to shift under full load, while coasting or even pedaling backwards. It is effectively a 22/36 crankset. The additional clearance this thing could give is pretty freaking crazy. This could also be pretty awesome if you had a bike that does not accommodate a front derailuer.

There were also couple of rigs they were setback for gawk and droll. One of those rigs was a preproduction UZZI in Works Blue. What an incredible looking bike. This one had the adjustable G3 dropouts set to the shorter wheelbase, a Rockshox Totem fork and the new (I think still prototype?) 2010 Fox DHX-A shock. I’m not sure how much the bike weighs but I guess around 34 pounds or so.

Later on in the morning the guys let me put some dirt on this thing and I have to say I was pretty freaking impressed. Daley Ranch is quite hilly but really does not have all the features to put this bike through all of it’s paces. There is enough there to establish an impression. If I had to sum up my thoughts of this rig into a single sentence it would have to be this.

A killer rig that will have you thinking you have much less than seven inches of travel when you are climbing and you will swear you have much more than seven inches of travel when you are descending.

I do very little shuttling or lift-assisted riding so a rig of this size would have to be able to climb for my usage. Daley Ranch is an excellent place to get your climb on, and I purposely picked a route that would meet my “threshold” for climbing. Basically if the rig could climb this route without undo pain, it would meet my criteria for a “climbable rig”. The sag on the DHX-A shock was not too far off for me so I only added air to the main pressure chamber to get the sag somewhere around 30-35%. So you know what I comparing against, my normal rig is a 6.6 and I have ridden it with an older style (15-click propedal) Fox DHX-A, a RP23, and most recently a Cane Creek Double Barrel shock. Right out of the gate I was impressed with the small bump compliance. I was taking the rockiest lines I could find and it felt really good. The propedal worked as it should, but I found that the climbing efficiency of the VPP design makes propedal not a major concern for me. The bike was setup in trail bike mode with the adjustable G3 dropouts setup for the shorter wheelbase, higher BB and steeper head angle. The slacker angles compared to my 6.6 with a TALAS 36 fork where noticeable on the climbs. I routinely drop my fork down on steeper climbs but you can’t do that with the Totem fork so adjusting your body position was required on the steeper stuff to keep the fork on the ground. This is something I find easily adaptable.

I worked my way to one of my favorite spots that has some rocks to play on that include some drops. I was pretty quite surprised when I hit the first drop. The rear shock felt freaking awesome. In the past I was never really able to get either the RP23 or the DHX-A balanced where I could have small bump compliance and not blow through all of my travel on drops. The feeling in the rearend of the bike on the landing was very similar to the progressive ramp up that you get with a coil shock. I was by myself, but still had to verbally say “WOW”. I spent a good chunk of time sessioning the drops and rocks just to keep checking out the feeling. This shock was not blowing through the midstroke travel like I had seen before in the older DHX-A on my 6.6. I have no idea what is going with the internal changes for the 2010 model but it is certainly a vast improvement. Now experience wise I’m still pretty new to the coil-shock scene, but I would have to say from a layman’s perspective this new DHX-A felt very coil like.

For the downhill stuff, Daley Ranch offers only small bits for letting this rig loose. When those spots came, the bike as expected shined. Holding lines, sucking up rocks and bumps, it was cool. I’m pretty sure this rig would be quite the Chunk Gnar-Meister. I’m betting that those G3 dropouts would be really awesome for some lift-assist action or someplace like Downieville where you could lengthen out the wheelbase, lower the BB and slacken up the headangle.

I sure hope the guys at Intense will be able to get off all the drool marks both I and everyone else left on thier bikes. 🙂

Sedona Day 3

Today started off a little earlier than the day before but not by much. We had a couple of locals to show us around today and they showed us the goods that started right from our Condo. We started off the on-the-map trails, but later in the ride we transitioned onto some “Locals Only” stuff that I was asked to keep off the air. Since talking about the on-the-map stuff we did would give some hints about the “other” stuff I am going to refrain from talking about them as well.

So you won’t see any explainations of the pretty selective pictures posted here. I ended up having to bailing out on the last little bit of trails on the return trip to get packed up and rolling towards home. I managed to make good time and was back at home at around 10pm. Trail names or not, I have yet to find a trail in Sedona that I did not like.

Hangover in Sedona

Day two of the Sedona trip started off real leisurely with a respectable wake up time and a casual breakfast as we were not meeting the Over The Edge crowd until around 11AM.

The group ended up running a little behind schedule and Bryce from St. George got into town early, so we entertained ourselves at the trailhead with a bit of “Coon Hucking”.

I wanted to shoot some video today, but I have not completed my new helmet cam setup for my XC helmet, the only thing I had setup was my full-face rig. I was also not interested in carrying two helmets with me, one for videoing and one for climbing/non videoing. Since it was quite cool to brisk out, I decided to just do the ride with the full-face ride.

Once everyone arrived, we soon started off on the Munds Wagon Trail which was a pretty nice climb mostly following along a creek drainage. It did not take long to realize that the full-face helmet was not a good choice. The slow speed of the climb was not venting the helmet well and I was often rebreathing a portion of my own “dirty” CO2 rich exhales. This sorta sucked and I soon myself hanging near the tailend of this large and extremely talented group of riders.

We eventually worked our way up to the Damifino trail for a bit of slickrock climbing and some occasionally exposure. At the top of the saddle on Damifino (Mitten Ridge Saddle) we had a nice regroup and bit of lunch and some hangout time before hitting up the Hangover Trail. Hangover is a pretty new trail, and while neither on the maps nor fully “in the fold” of the official trail system, the cat is certainly out of the bag and the officials know about it.

This a pretty freaking amazing trail that is etched into a small ribbon of dirt high up on one of the monuments in the Sedona Valley. It gets its name from the signature rocks that hangover the trail in numerous spots. Some of them force you to crotch way down and use a little body English to clear them.

One of these such hangovers gave me a real life “Over The Edge” moment. The left end of my handlebar was going to clip an inside rock. Now this did not look like a particularly exposed section as there were bushes to my right. I went into a trackstand to see if I could figure out a way to get around it and decided to put a foot down. I even looked where my foot was going to go. I put my foot down and all of the sudden the outer six inches of the trail crumbles underneath me. I tip over into the bushes and go right through them! At this point, everything went into that freaky “I’m so screwed” slow motion. As I go through the bushes an expansive view suddenly opens up in front and below me. The narrow strip of vegetation that this trail was built on was ending within a few feet. Below that were hundreds of vertical feet of the gorgeous red and white banded slickrock which is part of what makes Sedona such an incredible place. However, at this particularly moment in time, I can assure you that this is not the preferred viewing angle of these formations. In those brief microseconds I could see that the slope was moderate for the first 30 feet but after that, things get quite steep.

If I started tumbling this was going to end somewhere between bad and lethal. It was at this point that I believe my brain went into full survival mode and what happened next I contribute to instinctual DNA programming and not really any high-level cognitive process on “my” part. I remembered a moment when my butt was on the ground, my back to the down slope, and my legs going up in the air. I grabbed at the brush, then dirt, then clumps of then the most incredible desert scrub grass that I have ever had the pleasure of touching that arrested the start of a tumble and somehow allowed me to get fully prone. My final position had everything above my armpits on the grass and dirt, while everything else was on the rock below. I was quite thankful for the extra belly chub that I can’t seem to loose as it was a good source of friction on the rock. I could also feel my bike laying on my left leg. I certainly did not want to move that leg as I’m sure that once that bike got going it was not going to stop. The full-face helmet also came in handy here as I had wedged the chin portion into it into the dirt to provide a little more resistance to the pull of gravity that I could so intensely feel now. I was stopped now and I was quite content to hold my own and not move as I knew folks were behind me. Within seconds I could hear Jason, Quentin and others screaming and heading my way. I was afraid that if they rushed to yank me up, they would dislodge my bike laying on my leg and send it sliding away, so in true MTB Addict fashion, I told them to get my bike before me. (The pictures would later show they the bike was in much less danger of sliding away than I thought at the time) Soon there were hands and arms pushing and pulling on me to get me back up onto the trail. When the first person went to pull me up, it took a couple of “manual override” mental commands to convince my hands to physically let go of the grass that I was clinging to. Once back up on the trail and looking down at where I had been I realized I could have climbed back up on my own, but in that moment while face down into the dirt, I was happy to wait for help. One thing is for certain, I cashed in a truckload of Karma Points with this one.

After a couple of hoots and hollers at the sheer joy of being alive, we were back to riding. Before long I realized that my front tire had gotten whacked by a cactus during the fall and the sealant could not take care of everything. So I stopped at top of a large steep slickrock section to pick out the thorns and put in a tube. Kevin hung back with me, while I spent a good 20 minutes getting the dozen plus cactus needles out. The rest of the group waited at the last saddle a good chunk of time before running on ahead. I think most people talk about loosing of some “Mojo” after an incident on the bike, but for some reason the opposite occurred today. Maybe it was joy that comes from cheating death relatively unscathed or just plain stupidity, but I had a great ride down the rest of hangover and straight up flew down the Munds trails back to the trailhead. We arrived back just a couple of minutes after the rest of the group got there.

The rest of the evening would be spent enjoying pizza, yummy beers, and hanging out in a stupidly huge hot tub built for about 50. While chilling in the hot tube I discovered that I too had gotten whacked by a cactus during the fall. I ended up picking out about 15 needles from my leg. A small price to pay indeed. It is good to be alive!

Sedona Weekend – Day 1

O-DAMN Early came at O-DARK:30 this morning. Things seem to come together fairly quickly for this weekend getaway. It was not until earlier in the week did was I able to give the green light to meet some friends from Arizona, Utah, and Colorado in Sedona for some dirt time.

Today’s rides was just going to be a few of us as the rest of the hoodlums would not arrive until the following morning. I thought I was making really good time and when I pulled up to the trailhead about 10 minutes before the meet time. Kevin and Greg then informed me that I had forgotten about that pesky little time zone thingy, so I was an hour late. DOOOH! Oh Well, we ride!

We spent the remainder of the day playing on some fun and often technical trails that were for the most part between Soldier Pass Road and Dry Creek Road.

I am always amazed at just how pretty this place can be. It is one of those places were the scenery can be its own hazard.

I should have known by now, but whenever you ride with Kevin, there is a pretty good chance you are going to get in some technical climbing.

So while some may do a trail this-a-way Keving is gonna take you that-a-way.

I love the way the Arizona flora helps keep the singletrack single. Come off line, or dab in the wrong spot and there is a fair chance the trail is going to complain to you.

Once we reached our turn-around spot which was based more on daylight than mileage we enjoyed the fruits of some of our technical climbing efforts. We flowed, we bobbed, we weaved, and we had a really good time back to the trucks. We did not use up quite all of the daylight, but we did not leave much. Besides there was a hot tub and cold beers just down the road with our names on them. Why further delay things? While I did not have major party plans for the night, I felt a hangover was in my near future.

Desert Exploring

The title for this could also be “Another Chicken Soup for the MTB Soul Ride”. I went out to Anza Borrego Desert State Park today and and did some solo exploring. About 22 miles worth, and it was goooood! With the exception of a few miles I had done in my truck a few years back, this was all new dirt for me.

The conditions were pretty darn perfect. The normally pain-in-the-butt sand was well packed and with just enough moisture to make traction just right.

Please excuse me for being skimpy on details. Some of my wandering were “off the reservation” so to say and until I get a couple of things figured out it would not be smart of me to give out the goods, yet. One thing is for certain, I enjoyed myself. There was one moment in particular when the wind was perfectly still and there was absolutely no sounds whatsoever. Absolute quiteness. I mean you don’t even this level of quiteness in your house in the middle of the night. The incredible thing was that I could see for 30-40 miles in some directions. It was surreal. Moments like these are just one of the many reasons I love being a Mountainbiker.

2009 Opener – The Los Pinos Trail

What a great way to start off the new year with some dirt I have never been on. It has been on the list for quite a few years but I had never gotten around to get getting on it. From what I have been told we hit the trail when it was in the best condition in years. This trail is not for everyone, ummmm it would probably not be a stretch to say this trail is not for most riders. It has a grunch of hike-a-biking and some steep and often hairy descents. I’ll be getting a page up on the site before long on this one. For now here are some pics.

Rodman with some earlier “Just a Warmup” Hike-A-Bike.

The views did not suck all day.

Some of the mild Downage.

Where is Waldo on this brutal Hike-A-Bike Section?

Here’s a hint.

Mark on one of the ridable climbs. We were on the peak in the distance earlier.

More trail goodness.

Pretty much all the Hike-A-Bikage is done now. The San Juan Trail works it way along the face of the Sugarloaf peak in the distance.

Some techie bit near the bottom.

All in All, I would have to say we brought in the Newt Year in right!

Tacos For New Year’s Eve

Tacos were sounding good today. I went to Alpine to take some more flight lessons.

So I’m calling this a successful jump and landing, with a really bad bit of trail riding immediatly afterwards. My biggest mistake was not really looking at the landing closely before jumping. I have done that jump before but did not take notice of a rut that had developed after the rains and was just chilling there in the shade. If I had I would have made more of an effort to not to go as far left as I did. I really thought I was just going to scrap the bushes a bit and keep on riding.

Here are some shots of the aftermath.

This one taco deluxe!

I thought for sure I would be walking out of there as it was firmly in the hella jacked range.

Surprisingly enough I found that after showing the wheel some luving Ike Turner style, it was okay enough to get rolling again.

One thing is for certain, I confirmed that I am getting the full 160mm out travel out of my front fork. I got a scrap on the my thigh just above the pads and I aggravited an old injury to my right shoulder a bit. I even managed to hit a few smaller things on the return trip back down the mountain but a latter inspection revealed showed that this rim is going to have to be put out to pasture.

Long Overdue Fisher Mesa Video

Okay so this video took just a wee bit longer to get out that I expected. Truth is I got a little burnt out on editing video so I just set the footage aside. I rode Fisher Mesa in May on Day 5 of my Utah Colorado 08 Road trip. Fisher Mesa is a really cool out-and-back XC ride that falls into the “eat your desert first” category as the mesa descends from the trailhead all the way to the turn around point which can be up to 12 miles at the point. It is well worth the return effort. Fisher Mesa is a good chunk of distance from Moab. To give you a rough idea of where it is at, If you have ridden Porcupine Rim, the valley to the east is Castle Valley with it’s signature Castle Rock and the Priest and Nuns. The mesa across the valley to the east is Adobe Mesa. To the east of Adobe Mesa is Mary Jane Canyon and beyond that is Adobe Mesa. The Adobe Mesa Rim trails is on the east side of the mesa and it over killer views of the Fisher Towers, Top of the World and Fisher Valley. Like most of my photographic and video experience in this area of the country, it is tough to capture the beauty of the place.

Right Click here to download the 87MB video that run 6 minutes and 35 seconds.

Anza Borrego Desert Winter Goodness

“Against my better judgment, I’m going to join you.” That is how this adventure in the Anza Borrego Desert started when Greg decided to get onboard with a bit of riding way out in the east county of San Diego. It was late in the evening when we pulled the trigger to do a 28 mile shuttle run bright and early the following morning. Pretty much all the information I had gathered on riding in this desert was that you have only a small window after winter and spring rains to ride unless you are into abusive sand slogging. Southern California just had a sizable winter storm that brought plenty of rain and snow to the area. The window was supposedly open so it was time to go. It was still dark when I started my eastward trek and when I arrived at the upper trailhead in the early morning light it was cold with a little snow on the ground. It was a pretty winter scene in all directions. I soon met up with Greg and we beat feet to the lower trailhead about five miles south of Ocotillo Wells. I wanted to be the trail at around 9AM but I had underestimated how long the logistics were going to take so it was just before 10AM by the time we started pedaling.

The first chunk of the climbing up Pinyon Mountain Road off of Highway S2 was not bad at all as the snow was not deep and the tire treads had created dirt lines in the 4WD trail. As we climbed higher the tire tracks became compacted snow vice dirt and climbing became more interesting. As the snow became deeper, you had to stay right in the middle of the tire tracks other wise your pedals would strike the side of the groove and on more than a few occasions this started a series of pinball pedaling that often ended in putting a foot down in the snow.

As we reached the high point on the ride in the saddle between the Pinyon and the Vallecito Mountains at just under 4,000 feet the snow was a good foot deep. It was a gorgeous scene and the snow riding was still not too bad. We then came to an unmarked fork in the trail that was not annotated on the USGS topos or the park’s map. After a bit of head scratching we came of with the theory that one of these forks is a dead-end and the other is the through route off the mountain. We opted to go with the fork that had the most tracks on it. Slightly downhill we went and after a quarter of a mile we were presented with a wonderful vista at the turnaround of a dead-end trail. The reason this fork had more tracks was because there was two sets of tracks for every vehicle, one coming and one going. (This is Bill’s dumb thing not to do on the trail tip #276) The grade of this fork was just enough to make climbing on the tracks in the snow way too energy consuming so we hoofed it back to the fork.

The correct fork turned out to be the path less traveled. The trail only had maybe two or three vehicles pass through since the storm so the snow was not particularly compacted. The temperature had also risen enough that there was a slush factor developing. This combined to make for a squirrely and often laborious descent that slowed our progress. It was a great exercise in finely balancing momentum, steering finesse, and body English to keep moving forward. Get just one of these factors out of whack for a split second and a comically frustrating series of escalating over corrections would ensue. The end result usually was finding myself standing in deep snow humping my bike back into the tire grooves.

We soon came to one of the signature spots on this trail for the jeepers known as “The Squeeze”. It is a slot between two rocks that is just barely wide enough for a jeep to get through and it includes a step down. This was the only technical thing I had seen so far today so I felt inclined to give it a go despite some snow and ice in potentially inopportune spots. I ended up making it but not without the backend of the bike trying to pass the front for a scary second.

After a little less than two miles of the downhill slogging the snow was not longer a problem. We had stopped to grab some snacks after our last patch of snowy uphill hike-a-biking when we saw a low flying prop plane pass overhead. The plane suddenly swung around and made another pass over top. We joked that this was probably a patrol plane and they were wondering what the hell we were doing out here and were already calling us idiots in for a rescue later on tonight. We chuckled as the plane flew off thinking that they were up there shaking their heads at the sight of us.

From this point we had a down right awesome bit of downhill riding that would net us our highest speeds of the day. It was over far too quickly and we soon found ourselves doing a bit of mild climbing before descending into Hapaha Flat. It was quite comfortable and sunny now and we stopped at Split Rock for a snack and to snope around for the Indian Pictographs which were supposed to be around here. The reason for the name of the rock was much more obvious than the pictographs. We found indian morteros easy enough but only after carefully examination did we find the some faded and diminutive pictographs. I was expecting something more on the impressiveness scale like the ones in Moab so I was a little disappointed.

The next two miles was quick and the sandy trail was just what I hoped it would be, packed and fast. I was digging this section. The wide open Hapaha Flat gave way to the more defined Fish Creek Wash as we gradually descended into a different geological era when this area was the seabed of the Gulf of California. The steep walls were composed mostly of large sedimentary rocks that looked like you could pull one out from the bottom and the entire wall could come tumbling down. I was not going to test the theory.

At we continued along, the wash twisted and turned and the large rocks gave way to mud sediment and sandstone layers. While the jeep trail was for the most part was “just a wash” the scenery around us was an ever changing tapestry of textures and colors. We passed by numerous smaller washes that were feeding into Fish Creek wash. Many of the washes contain interesting features that I have only read about so far. With each passing wash both the moisture in the soil and the drag on our tires increased. We had about six miles left in the ride when the resistance of the wash significantly overcame the pull of gravity and riding down the wash transitioned from mild spinning to increasingly laborious.

Fish Creek Wash used to be a free flowing creek that cut through soil and rock faster than tectonic forces could push up what is now Split Mountain from underneath. The result is a spectacular gorge that I was not expecting to see in San Diego County. Even though I was pretty pooped and the wash was a solid slog and at this point, this was cool stuff. The kind of stuff you should see at least once.

While mashing along through Split Mountain a State Park Ranger rolled up in his jeep and eagerly greeted us with “Hey we have been talking about you guys”. The plane that overflew us was indeed the state park patrol plane and they did do a double take and before radioing in a “You are not going to be believe this” call. He was happy to see us as he knew he would not have to spend the night out looking for lost and stranded bikers. After some chit-chat we went along our way and finished up the final and downright brutal two miles of slogging to the waiting car.

This was an amazing ride that is not about the trail but the scenery all around it. Slogging builds character, and I sure felt like one after this ride. With the diverse spread of terrain that you travel through, I suspect there will be some measure of slogging no matter when you do it. While I’m in no hurry to rush out and do it again in the coming weeks, I am going to get back out here with my truck, hiking gear and my boys to do some exploring in the lower reaches where there are mud caves, slot canyons and more pictographs. I am stoked to have gotten out into this back corner of San Diego County.