Category Archives: bikes

bikes, MTB, roadtrip, travel

Roadtrip Planning!

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Here is the long promised Summer 2011 West USA Roadtrip outline.  Ever since I realised that I would be ending a year in Canada with a car (probably), my long held pipe-dream of a classic USA roadtrip with my mountain-bike in the trunk (or on the back or on the roof – you get the idea) took many steps closer to reality.  My visa here expires mid-May, so the plan is to leave sometime just before that & travel down from the Alberta-Montana border to San Diego (with much time spent in Utah & Colorado) trying to do as much riding as possible.  As I’m also a bit of a sucker for famous sites & sights, plenty of National Parks & other such things will also be included – maybe even some hiking &, dare I say it climbing, could be in order too.  After spending time with good friends again in San Diego it’ll be up the west coast to British Columbia & then back across to Canmore to sell the car & leave for London again.

I’ve done a bit of research on the mtbr.com forums & other useful websites, but I’m keen to hear the ideas of others.  Here is a loose plan (in vague chronological order & which I haven’t really looked at for a while) of the places I intend to visit so far.  I fully realise that by the time I get to ride in some places, it will be stinking hot – but that’s just the way the visa timing works out; I think I’ll be doing quite a lot of early morning riding.  If anyone has any suggestions of great places to visit or ride that I might be able to work in to such a plan – please, please let me know.  Perhaps more importantly, if riding in such places appeals & you’re keen & possibly able to join me (for whatever part) – let me know, it’d be fantastic to share some sublime riding with friends.

Now I know why I was putting this off – there’s still six months to go & just writing about it makes that seem so far away.  If the taste of riding I had in the South West last year is anything to go by – it’s going to be a ripper.

bikes, Canada, MTB, vehicles

Riding Diary

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With a nice snowy & cool forecast up now (thanks Alex), there is some hope that it will start snowing properly soon & I’ll be able to kick the relative laziness of the last few weekends by getting out skiing.  Sunshine hasn’t opened yet – they have delayed it for lack of snow.  Somehow I ended up buying a pair of secondhand  XC skis & boots yesterday – so I should be able to keep my cardio fitness up over the winter with a night or two a week on the XC trails at the Nordic Center.

Thursday, being the eleventh of November was Remembrance Day here in Canada.  The annual parade is at a bit more of a reasonable hour than the ANZAC Day dawn parades back home – but having worked my final double-shift the previous night, I appreciated the sleep-in so only saw the tail end of the parade from Alex & Megan’s balcony – did hear the pipes & the Last Post, so that was cool.   The local rags were full of tributes to Canada’s fallen & serving troops – nicely, it’s all a much bigger deal over here than back home.  I don’t think I’ve ever remarked here that many provinces & states have special registration plates for veterans – that’s kind of nice.  Also, the plates in this part of the world are so much more interesting than NZ’s bland black on white plates.  It seems I don’t have too many pictures of NZ cars, but here’s one of the only car I ever owned in NZ – I definitely got my money’s worth out of that.  The second picture shows an old-school white on black (non-reflective) NZ plate on a friend’s Capri restoration.

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Also on Remembrance Day, our big package of bike parts turned up from Jenson.  I’ve just now got to get around to installing a new drive train, nice new grippy (can you say grippy? – that’s for you Gareth) tires, grips (they had better be grippy too) & and a brand spanking new bottom bracket.  I’ll leave going tubeless for next year when my bike isn’t just sitting around in the garage.  I’ve been messing around very briefly with trying to share the odd document on Google Docs.  As this riding season comes to an end, here is my Riding Diary.  This goes back four years to when I started training for my first Karapoti Classic – since then I’ve just kept it going detailing every single ride I’ve been on.  Unfortunately, my bike computer died so some of the distance & time fields aren’t completed.  But you get the idea – I think I’ve done just a tad over sixty rides this summer/fall.  As you can imagine, there are a lot of good memories, friends & places visited detailed there.  Not all the functionality made the transfer from .odt to .xls to GoogleDocs format, but that’s not all that important.  My poor bike has done well over five-thousand kilometres off road now (ranging from NZ & Australia to Nepal to North America to Britain & Europe to Kenya), but at least it’s not as neglected as the singlespeed left in Rotorua – only about four hundred kilometres on that.  When I sort out what OpenOffice did to all the hyperlinks I had in my roadtrip worksheet, I’ll get around to posting that too.

around home, bikes, Canada, MTB

It’s always surprising just how quickly fitness fades

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Only one month ago was the previous long weekend (don’t despair – there’s another public holiday this week, Remembrance Day) & between stuffing myself with turkey & other Thanksgiving goodness I managed four good rides – including that epic Jumpingpound/Cox Hill combo.  Most of that fitness seems to have gone.  Maybe it was the cooler air, but my lungs were screaming as I climbed up to the top of the Prospector loop this afternoon.  I was annoyed at having to sit in the granny ring for much of the climbing – but pleased to clear that tricky steep bit just before the climb flattens out in the middle.

After turning at the top, it wasn’t long before a big grin was back on my face.  I wasn’t riding particularly well, but that trail is just so much fun I couldn’t help smiling.  Quickly I had a little bit more flow back in my riding.  As I was by myself, I avoided most of the more difficult trail features (some of them seem to have changed a bit – one I looked at & just couldn’t believe I’d managed to talk myself in to riding off/down it, let alone not crashed & burned) & simply enjoyed being out in the sunshine with a bone dry trail under wheel (I was going to write tyre, but now my spelling is getting confused & I couldn’t decide if tire was better or not).

This little ride was also notable for the groups I met.  Near the start I came across two guys carrying rather large crossbows who were quite keen on knowing if I had ever seen any sheep up this way.  I hadn’t, I thought sheep lived on golf courses in New Zealand.  As I rolled on to the biggest feature at the top I was mobbed by a pack of eight dogs – the two guys with them tried calling them off with some degree of success.  Still, it was somewhat unnerving to have a dog running up my escape ramp (I’m never going to attempt that gap) to the right.  After the Pennsylvanian & Kenyan dog attack incidents, I’m not all that keen on packs of barking dogs – but I escaped unharmed.

Back home Megan, Finnian & I went exploring the riverside walking path upstream as far as it would go in the relative warmth (I still think it should be a lot less than 10ºC in early November).  Megan for some reason had a hankering for poutine & I’m not one to discourage such things, so we grabbed some of that artery-clogging-pleasure on the way back.  After stumbling on that video this morning, I’ve just wasted too much time watching trail videos of rides I did in California & Utah last year.  This skiing caper best be good (when it arrives) or else I’m going to go spare in anticipation.

bikes, MTB, USA

Found this little video

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Stumbling around mtbr.com while I work up the motivation to go out for a cold, damp ride, I found this neat little video of the Cannell Plunge trail I rode when camping with some randoms I’d met on mtbr.com north of LA last year.  I’m pretty sure this is the last section which was a complete blast (dropped five thousand feet in eight miles apparently) that absolutely fried my brakes.  As this riding season comes to an end up here in the Rockies, I can’t wait for the next one in the western USA.  I’ve just decided on all the replacement parts that need ordering – perhaps I will have to go in to outdoor sports winter hibernation to finance the trip, but that’s not too likely.


Here’s my take on the whole trail.