I made it up to Horsetooth this weekend. First time doing the Towers and Mill Creek loop this year.  I had heard there was some damage at the park from the last heavy wet snow fall a week ago, but didn’t think it would be so devastating.

Frankly, most of the park is fine, tacky and fast right now for mountain biking.  Mill Creek though in particular is a mess.

There are so many fallen tree’s from heavy snow just on that part of the park that Mill Creek is absolutely impassable by bike, hardly by hiking.   It will take weeks for crews to clear it up.  There is not a single 200 foot section of that trail that is not blocked in some way!!  Bummer … almost any and every tree that was healthy took a beating.  I’ll be looking for volunteer days up there to help with the clean up.

On the brighter side – nothing like a freshly tuned-up mountain bike…

Mountain bike all set to go, cables, bearings, bled the brake,  chain, bled the brake again.  Pedals should show up tomorrow.

Been lazy to switch pedals over so I’ve been riding the crosscheck in the mean time.  Rode parts of maxwell to get up top… then managed to somehow double flat on the reservoir high trail.  Pinch flat on the rear, then while I’m standing there inspecting, the front pops!?  wha wha wha whaaaaa…

While my pedals are back at crankbros for the 3rd time (been cracking them routinely?), I thought I’d take the time to give the Limo some TLC.  I bought new cables and plan to address a sticky rear brake, then also discovered my new-ish primo bb bearings were shot to hell.  Disappointing…  back to the $5 steelies from the local fan shop.

Bearings serviced and repacked (get me by for a while), cables done, now the brake hmmm…  I don’t really feel like doing it, but bleed the brake I must.

Welp, my web hosting company went under.  I lost a year and some change worth of posts, some page work, and a few other things (all my links disappeared, tag cloud, etc.).  Sucks, but not much I could do.  I consider myself lucky to have a raw SQL dump from the beginning of 2008, and a back up of the design from a few months ago.

After months of procrastination and no time… finally got around to the fun journey of upgrading an older WordPress SQL dump, importing, and re-building things.  I think I can even restore the missing content manually since I was able to grab a cached page from google!  (smart thinking eh!?)  Only a handful of posts to re-create.

My new hosting is awesome and the new built-in WordPress install is nifty!  Although I’m not sure I like the new 2.7* WordPress, seems to becoming more and more cluttered.

Been slacking at the blog a bit lately, but here we go on some catch up. A month ago, the 18th of November to be exact, I met up with Steve, Jay P, Dave Newman of the Breakfast Club to do the new Ginny Trail up at Bobcat Ridge. A handful of Jay’s co-horts glommed on in the parking lot and off we went.

According to Steve we did the trail “backwards” or up the service road and down the trail. Personally, I like this type of ride where the climb is brutal but the trail down is sweet. And sweet it was – to date I think this is my favorite local trail!! It’s a Towers-like fitness test of a climb, and the downhill is flowing, ups, downs, curves, exposure and rocks… but always moving. With 8-9 riders or so all near the same riding level, the comradery was fun.

I did however get my first flat (in the field) of the season. Not bad eh… made it all the way to November. But I was asking for it… my Nevegals are shredded with small tears in the side walls and a few missing side knobs. I have some new Big Betty’s I’ll be putting on the hoops to try out next. If anything they’ll be good for training, as in like heavy.  Note:  I have had several flats this season, 3 overnight while hanging on the garage wall, and two while sitting in the back of my truck (weird).

Click on either of the pics here to go to the flickr photo set.

You can get a full write up of this ride on Steve’s blog HERE.

And here’s a cool pic of Steve with the new Yeti in a fire burn out area… you can the see the trail leading off in the distance…

I recently took the camera with me on my morning bike commute….

Click on the pic to go to the flickr photo set:

Coming into the home stretch for this biking season with no 24hrs of Moab planned, we had been talking about doing a big epic, scenic mtb ride up west of Boulder. Ryan took the initiative to organize this years bigun… a 54 mile ride starting in Nederland, riding to the Sourdough trail, to Camp Dick/Peaceful Valley, to a gnarly jeep road climb up and out the St. Vrain trail, then back to Boulder down Canyon road. You can see a map of the journey here.

We started off with 8 from Ned at around 8:30am. We lost two along the way. Kevin bailed a bit early before we really started to get into the woods. He was a bit in over his head for this round… but we’ll be seeing more of Kevin. Then part way into the Sourdough trail, K8 had a sudden fall due to her cleat actually giving away. Her left cleat had pulled loose and a necessary metal piece had popped out and was lost. Without being able fix it and clip in, she decided to turn back and not risk injury – total bummer! This was stupid unfortunate However, she ended up shopping in Boulder with Kate B. of course while the rest of us pressed on.

We took it in stages with several stops to regroup and check the map. In a couple spots we had to back track a half mile or so after taking some wrong turns. Arriving in Camp Dick we thought we could re-fill our water packs but found the spigots had been turned off for the winter season. Took a bit of time to pawn some water off campers, and even stopped at a shack store in Raymond for some Gatorade before the last BIG climb.

In the end, rolling back into Boulder we crashed at Proto’s pizza and prompty ordered 5 beers and 5 large pizzas, polished it all. No mechanicals, no bad falls, and we made it.

You can check out my photos at flickr:
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Dave’s photos at Picasa:
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And Ryan’s photos at Backpackit:
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Finally! After missing the bike parade two years in a row due to, uh, unforeseen drinking too much the night before… yeah, we made it to this years Tour De Fat bike parade. Turns out this year was a world record for the largest organized bicycle parade… I was told the final tally was around 4,800 people.

This ended up being, hands down, some of the most fun I’ve had on a bike. MK was in town with friends from Estes, everyone was in costume and riding cool bikes. We all met up at James’s house with others, had mimosas and champagne before heading down to New Belgium. The craziness began with a drunk guy wiping out on the train tracks on the way down to the brewery. What a hoot. Here’s K8 & James at New Belgium before the parade started (click on the pic to go the to flickr photo set):