started off the weekend with my first look at the new hoyles mill connector... as one of the MORE picnic rides, we (mike miller, ricky, joe yannie, and a couple of guys i didn't know) did a lap of schaeffer at a breakneck pace, then picked up a couple of other riders (dan, susan, and pooch) and headed out on the connector towards black hill regional park. the pace settled down a bit, but many, many mechanicals - and a couple of falls - made for a long day. the connector is really well ridden in for a trail that's less than a year (or in some cases a month) old. the trail still isn't continuous singletrack, but most of the places that it's on trail are really nice and a couple of sections on the black hills side that rich edwards built with the machine are really really sweet and flowy. we rode some rarely ridden trails on the north side of black hill, then hit the hard rock & cabin branch trails before heading back towards schaeffer. by the time we got back to the cars we had 35 miles of riding behind us and had been out for over 5 hours. the time seems like we were taking it easy, but we actually pushed a pretty hard pace the whole time, there were just a lot of breaks, but that seems to be case with some group rides, especially when you're hitting trails that people don't know.
went back to schaeffer by myself this afternoon and just rode... around and around for almost 3 hours hitting almost every inch of trail, most several times over. mixed up the pace, pushing hard sometimes, taking it easy other times, tried not to stop more than i needed. had more chain issues near the start of my ride. shifting problems caused something to happen (not sure exactly what) that mangled a link in the new chain i put on at big bear. pulled out the half mangled link and threw a master link in it's place. gotta see if i can get pick up some pc-99s, these pc-990s don't seem to be holding up. still, a pretty cool way to spend an afternoon...
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2 comments:
It was fun finishing off the Schaefer lap with you guys on Saturday. I'm glad you enjoyed the connector, you should try and it make it out to one of the rides Pete and I lead there soemtime.
How was the other side of blackhill? I've actually never ridden that.
it was interesting... we rode cool spring run & turkey hill loop (?)...
cool spring run (off the other side of the road between the 2 black hills sections of the connector) was a long wide singletrack downhill (like cabin branch) to a stream crossing, followed by a steep fall line climb (no one rode the whole climb) and then a slightly less steep downhill on the other side.
the turkey hill loop connected from there up a steep grassy hill, back down the other side, along a reservoir, back to the bottom of cool spring run, which we then climbed back over (mostly rideable this way) through the stream crossing, and back up to the road.
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