During our 2009 Breckenridge Mountain Biking trip we were talking about our first trip to Colorado like they were the good ole’ days. It has been 8 years since we took our first journey out west to the mountain biking mecca. Our talk wasn’t about how great the trip was, it was about how our trips have changed since 2001.
So I dug out the old photo album… and that was one of the top five things that have changed since the 2001 Crested Butte Mountain Biking Trip.
Photographic Memories – In 2001 I had my Canon EOS 35mm film camera. I remember taking 6 rolls of film during the trip. That’s 144 photos! I had to pay extra to get my photos scanned and put on CD. We did not have any video recorders. In 2009, we had 4 Digital SLR’s and 3 helmet cameras. Our trips slowly changed from photographic memories to massive videos of our biking trip. We had over 30 gigs of biking video (15 hours) in the 2009 trip.
Accommodations - In 2001 we set up 2 large tents at Lake Irwin. We took the tents that our parents had from the early 1980′s. We took showers by warming up a bag of water in the sun and hanging it on a tree. JJ bathed old school style with a heated pot and a pan. We also paid for showers at hostels and coin operated showers. Then came Eddy, Shanda and Kevin who wanted regular accommodations so we began with a small condo. Then came the luxury homes. In 8 years we went from ghetto tents to luxury homes. Check out the ghetto tents!! Notice the rock tie downs as the plastic yellow stakes don’t penetrate Colorado rock.
Bikes – I’ll let the pictures do the talking… Hardtails with 1″ travel on the front. How did we ride those trails??
Skillz - We have gotten so much better at both climbing and descending. Look at that difficult streaming crossing below! I can’t believe we walked it. LOL
One thing that hasn’t changed in the past 8 years for sure is the amount of fun we have every time we go.
This year we decided to go back to Sun Valley. We had a great time on the trails back in 2004 and were eager to get back and ride our favorite trails. Half of us were flying and half were driving. My flight was from Phoenix to Salt Lake City to Hailey, ID.
I only had 20 minutes to make my connection flight at the Salt Lake City airport and it happened to be super far walk from terminal to terminal. I made it to my flight with just a few minutes to spare. My brother and Rico did not. Luckily flights from SLC to Hailey are like city buses, there was another flight in 15 minutes! I don’t know how they can afford to have that many flights a day. When I got on the plane there were only 6 other people on the plane.
After a short hour flight I was landing in Hailey, Idaho. The Hailey airport is a very small airport with a very small staff. My first site was the groundswoman pushing the ladder towards the door. The same person unloaded the baggage and brought it to the terminal. Inside later, the same person was checking in people for flights. She has many jobs!
My luggage didn’t make it on my flight, but luckily it came on the flight 15 minutes later, along with Rico and Kevin. We got our rental cars and drove to Ketchum.
July 13th
For our first ride we went with the good ole Chocolate Gulch Trail. Since none of us were really in shape this year, this was our warm up ride. The helmet camera was back in full force. Hard to believe how the world was before Youtube but this sites finally getting an upgrade to streaming video and cool photo albums.
We did a new trail on day two. This trail was called Little Basin and was up by Stanley. As you can see from the pictures and video, there were many creek crossings. This was a pretty decent trail with not alot of climbing. I honestly don’t remember that much about this trail even after watching the video.
In case you are wondering, its the Garmin Edge 305 that is tracking our rides and giving us these great maps and elevation profiles. I highly recommend it.
album:/sv2008/littlebasin
July 15th
On day 3 we rode the Imperial Gulch trail. The trail has changed since we rode it back in 2004. There used to be bulldozed road at the top of this trail, but it’s totally gone now. It’s still a great trail to ride because you get great views of the rolling hills, decent singletrack and a great downhill to finish it off. You will get to see the new backwards view helment camera on this trail.
album: sv2008/imperialgulc
July 16th
After 3 days of riding we were either going to have a rest day or do an easy ride. We chose to do Corral Creek since it didn’t look that tough and we could shuttle it. We decided to park one car in a parking lot near the new Sun Valley Gun Club and then drive up to the top of the trail. It really wasn’t the top of the trail, it was just a convenient starting point. We parked at and old corral (probably why the trail is called corral creek) about 2 miles in from the main road. We rode this trail twice and have video of the helmet camera pointed forward and backwards. The first time we rode it we shot past our car and ended up near the gun club. We had to backtrack through the open meadow to get back to our cars.
Today is when we go back to one of our favorite rides in the US, Fisher Creek. Wildfires burnt down most of the vegetation along this trail which made the trail look totally different than 4 years ago. Again, we did the one hour smooth climb on the access road. Then a short steep uphill and we were at the top of Fisher Creek. As you can see from the photos, all the trees had been burnt. Instead of green foliage along the sides of the trail, you could see the whole hill and trail below you.
Eddy and I decided to enter the 1st ever Orange County Adventure Race since it was only 15 minutes away from Eddy’s house. As usual, we never train or prepare for these things. We figure that we are in such awesome shape that these races are nothing! This race consists of 1 mile of paddling, 5-6 miles of mountain biking and a 3-4 mile run.
So as usual, the night before we are running around trying to find an inflatable boat and some life vests.
The race started with a 1 mile run to three checkpoints. At each checkpoint we had to pick up some parts that would be used to make our boat paddles. Once back at the staging area, we put together the paddles with tie wraps and duct tape and pumped up the boat.
The boating part would have been easy if, we could paddle straight and we knew where we were going.
When we hopped into the lake we counted about 40 boats in front of us so we figured we were in the middle of the pack. When we exited the lake we only counted 15 or so boats behind us.
The next activity was a short obstacle course and a 6′ wall to hop over. Then it was off to the mountain biking section. The biking section was fairly easy it was half on dirt and half on pavement. We really couldn’t catch or pull ahead of any bikers because it was mainly flat.
Lastly the running section came. We usually call this, the walking section. I think we lost probably another 10 places here with our very slow jog rate.
Our final result was 2:45 which put us around 29th place out of 40 or so 2 person teams.
