Mountain Bike Bill, The Dirt on the Dirt

Category: Travels

Galbraith Mountain – Bellingham WA

Last Sunday I went up to Bellingham WA to check out Galbraith Mountain as I had heard it had the goods.  The folks who gave me that 411 were right on the money.  This place RULES plan and simply.    I got in a week’s worth of stoke in a single day.  This was a good thing as work this past week has been a real beater that consumed all of my physical and mental energy.   Luckily the tidal wave of work had moved on by this past Saturday evening.  This Sunday I found myself once again heading north to enjoy Galbraith Mountain once again.

The place is sorta broken up into two areas, the Lakeview Drive side and the Galbraith Lane side.  There are miles and miles of good trails all over the place here with most of the XC oriented stuff on the Lakeview Side and the DH/Freeride stuff over on the Galbraith Lane side.

The weather on both days turned out to be killer but both started somewhat cloudy and progressively got better.   Once you get inside the dense forest it really does not matter wither the sun is out or not as the forest canopy renders the light in some spots just a few levels dusk.   Nothing but yellow or clear lenses if you are going to ride here.

The first day out here I started on the Lakeview side and rode a series of trails over to the Galbraith side.  One fun trail was call Bob’s Cedar Dust as there are a ton of skinnies of various difficulties to dare you into trying them.  You see so much of this stuff you just have to give it a try.

If you choose to, you can spent most of your climbing on forest roads and then catch a series of singletracks back down the mountain.  Getting to the top of Galbraith is where the real fun starts.  There are several north-shore style trails coming off the top that will get your fix on if you are into that kind of thing.  Most of the riders I met heading up to the top where on beefy downhill and freeride rigs.

The rewards for your efforts are some really killer black diamond level trails that will peg your stoke meter or scare the crap out of you.   There is a good chance that both may happen at the same time.   The first day out here I hooked up with a couple of local young guys.  They were too old to be “groms” but they did talk about calling there mom to come pick them up near the end of the day.  I’m guessing somewhere around 16-18.   I bring it up because following these fearless young bucks was feeding my mojo and I started hitting stuff I would normally balk at or stop and think about first.  Small to medium gaps, tabletops, kickers and 4 foot drops where just happening.  Now I was not transformed into some hucker that day, but a new level of comfort was obtained on this type of terrain.   Riding with these folks who were more than half my age certainly made me feel half my age.   Mountain Biking is just freaking great!

One of the most killer trails out here that I rode was Evolution.  It has an incredible mix of ladders, berms, gaps, log rides and other BC inspired stuff that just rocks!   The Korn song of that same name popped into my head and it has been stuck there ever since.

I’m pretty sure you can not get all of the trails bagged in a single day out here.  It would take at least three humps to the top of Galbraith to get in the really cool stuff near the top.  The last section to the top gets steep and it will put some hurting on you.  Granny and me had it going on during both of my visits here.

As far as what trails to hit, the general consensus on the All-Mountain scene are: Evolution, Mullet, Cheech and Chong’s Wild Ride, Not Shawns, Meth Lab, Scorpion and SST are “Da Bomb”.  I rode all of those and then some with the exception of SST.   On the cross country scene, the Whoopsie Woodle trail way in the Southwest back 40 of Galbraith is pretty darn cool.   Have no idea what I’m talking about?   Well when you roll into Bellingham swing by one of the shops (I hit up Fantik) and pick up a map printed on waterproof paper.  They were $8 and they are really nice and the profits help out the local advocacy group.

Bellingham is also a really cool town with an awesome vibe.  The Boundary Bay Brewery and Bistro is not to be missed for post ride goodness.   Thier IPA is killer and the Rueben sandwich is to die for.   Killer trails, Great Brews and Yummy Food  — I’m digging this place!

Whistle Lake Goodness

Saturday I ventured north to check out the Whistle Lake area of the Anacortes Community Forest Lands.  I had been to the Cranberry Lake area the week before and I was ready to check out some more of the goods in Anacortes.

Man there was some fun single track out by Whistle Lake but there are no freebies.  You have got to earn them.   The good news is what goes up must come down.    The number of trails in this area is simply bewildering and it is hard to go more than a third of mile without having a trail junctions to think about.

While on one of the trails near the top of “Sugar Cube”  I had an incredible critter encounter.    As I rounded a corner a bald eagle flew up from the trail where it had recently whacked some small furry critter and had it for lunch.   It flew up into a nearby tree and started checking me out. 

While it looked concerned with me a first, it soon seemed to figure out that I meant it no harm and seemed rather comfortable with my presence.   Over the next five minutes I would go through a series of snapping pictures and moving a little closer until it decided it had better things to do.    

This eagle is bigger than it looks.  I’m guessing that those talons if out stretched would be about the size of an average man’s hand.  Simply impressive.

An hour or so later in the ride I would once again have another cool critter encounter.  This time it was with a spotted owl and the sequence of events was similar to that the eagle. 

I love checking out the “Back 40” wherever I go.  On this day that looked to be the south side of the lake.  The trails over here were much steeper and trickier with more roots and rocky sections.

It would be a really big feat to ride all of the stuff in a single day as it takes multiple loops of climbing to the top of several hills that can work the legs over really well. 

I did as many climbs up the hills as I could stand and still did not get to all of the trails.  I finished the day with my legs thoroughly shot and a big smile on my face.

Tree Farming in the Great Northwest

The weather for most of this past week has been “Bi-Polar” here in the great northwest.  It would be cold, raining and breezy and the next thing you know the sun would come out and the temperature would shoot up pretty much into the comfortable range.  Wednesday ended up being a rainless day and I managed to grab some late afternoon miles at the Armstrong Tract of the Pilchuck Tree Farm north of Arlington. 

The Pilchuck Tree Farm is a some hugh chunk of private land that is used for logging.  The company/land owners have allowed trails and public recreation on their land for over 20 years.  Of course patches of trail are going to go away from time to time as various segments gets logged over the years.  Despite the obvious bummage of this, the up side is the place is ever changing. 

One thing is for sure there is a bunch of miles out here.  I got in about 18 miles of rolling and mostly buff singletrack during my afternoon visit and I know I missed a bunch of stuff.  I had a very rudimentary map that was rather large scale which meant I was basically on my own.  I love solo riding like this as the miles seem longer and I feel more in tune with my surroundings as you have to paint your own mental map of where you are at and how you are going to get back at some point.

I was digging the rolling terrain and the aburpt transitions as you go from the unattractive barreneque clearcuts into lush forest. While the trails were for the most part buff there were some sections that were rooty with plenty of logs across the trail.  I got a really good skills workout in from the logs alone. 

There were more trail junctions in this area than I can count.  For the first part of the ride I took whatever option looked to go away from the trailhead.   When the remainder of the day dictated it was time to turn back, I took every turn that I thought would delay my return.  I did loops, backtracks and generally confused myself.  This was one of my adventures were I actually used my GPS for something other than a simple data logger.

I ended up back at the trailhead with some daylight left, so I decided to check out what was supposed to be a somewhat short loop nearby.  This loop was indeed short but it also ended up going through a low lying area that became more than a bit of a mucky mess.  Getting through this area took much longer than I thought it would and the waning daylight inside the moss covered forest looked somewhere between surreal and spooky.   By the time I got back to the trailhead, I could officially classify my day as extremely “efficient”.  I doubt I had more than one minute of daylight left.     Just the way I like it 🙂 

A romp through Anacortes singletrack goodness

Yesterday, I ventured north of Seattle to the town of Anacortes, where tales of miles single track goodness seemed to abound.   My first order of business upon rolling into the sound-side town of Anacortes was to pickup a set of maps from a local bike shop.  For $10 I got three great maps of the Anacortes Community Forest Lands. That was all I needed to get to the trailhead at Cranberry Lake.  

 

The weather forecast gave a 50% chance of showers with the temps in the low 50s.   It certainly looked like I was going to get wet today.   A few days ago someone said something interesting that stuck in my head.  “There is no bad weather, only bad gear.”  With that in my head, I packed up my gear and hit the trail.  Right from the trailhead I was on some cool single tracks that were combinations of loamy buff with some rocks and roots here and there.

Riding in an evergreen forest is just awesome.   Believe it or not these are multi-use trails.  Yes these twisty and flowing singletracks are open to hikers, equestrians and bicycles.   These are community trails and most of them are within the city limits of Anacortes.    The land managers and agencies of San Diego County could learn a lot from this place. 

Did I mention these trails rule?   The Anacortes Community Forest Lands has about 50 miles of interconnected trails with over 41 miles of those trails being single tracks. 

Got Beaver?  

Got Bald Eagle?

As the day went on the weather turned for the better and the sun even popped out.  I found myself openly giggling while I cruised and twisted through the forest.   On several occasions I could not help but to stop, grab a spot on a log and just take it all in.   I am one lucky bastard to get to ride stuff like this on a business trip. One thing is for certain, I am going back here at least once more on this trip as I have only scratched the surface of this trail system.

Japanese Gulch

By the end of the workday on Wednesday, I was dog tired. However, the sun was out and the weatherman was calling for rain and general crappiness on Thursday. I can rest when it is raining so I headed out to Japanese Gulch in Mukilteo. Lucky for me my hotel is in Mukilteo and the trailhead is just a few miles away.  I could have ridden the streets to the trailhead but not knowing where the trails would take me, I decided to drive to the trailhead and start from a known location. The trailhead also happens to be at the bottom of the trail system which could make for a quicker return should I start running out of daylight.

What a score this place turned out to be. There is a railroad track, that goes up the middle of the gulch and and on either side are steep wooded hillsides. There are trails on both sides of the gulch that loosely follow the top, bottom and part-way up the hillsides. 

The trails are almost exclusively singletrack with really nice flow.  There are also plenty of undulations in the trails so wither you are going up or down the gulch you will get to do some grunting as well as some grinning.   It is just a matter of the ratios between the two depending which direction you are going. 

 I started out climbing up the southside of the gulch on one of the hillside trails.   There were quite a few grunting sections as well as some tight turns.    It was all good by me as I was digging the loamy soil as well as the greenery.     Even though the flora has not broken out of winter mode yet, it was still pretty.  I had lots of oppurtunites to take it all in as there were numerous intersections were it was purdent to look around before moving on.

 I avoiding descending too much as I made my way up the gulch.  There are several trails that short cut between the high trails and the low trails.  It was on these short cut trails were I saw the remenants of a few hucker projects.   None of them showed much recent use and mother nature was working hard to reclaim them.

 When I got to the top of the gulch I cruised along a few trails before I popped out into an open area and HOLY CRAP I could see my hotel. Sweeeeeeeet!   Now I could drop into the gulch from almost right out my front door.   With this most killer info locked in my head I started back down on the other side of the gulch.

There were just as many twists, turns an general flowy goodness on this side of the gulch.   My daylight was starting to dwindle so I spent less time exploring and more time heading down.  I passed a couple of bailout trails were I could have dropped down to the railroad tracks and zipped right down the trailhead.   Even with the threat of darkness rising, I was not in enough of a hurry to pass up singletrack.   I ended up bobing, weaving and undulating my way back down to the trailhead on proper singletracks and arrived back at the car in the twilight.  An afternoon well spent in my book.

 The general consenus is that San Diego weather guessers have it pretty easy.  Sunny with temps in the mid-60s to mid-70s will be correct 75% of the year so we don’t attract the best and brightest weather folks.  It must be the same in Seattle except the standard prediction is going to be cool and gloomy with a good chance of rain.   So was the predications for Seattle on Thursday.   First thing in morning it was indeed cool and gloomy.   By lunchtime however, the weather turned pretty good with sunshine and brisk but not cold temps.  AKA Great!   I knew what I would be doing after work.

Within 15 minutes of getting back to the hotel room, I was out the door and on the bike.  A few minutes later and I am on my freshly found trail from the day before and headed back into Japanese Gulch.  Since I had rushed through the north side of the gulch the day before, I explored my way down the gulch this time.   At intersections I would often take all the turns figure out were they went and doubleback to try the other directions.   It was a good time for sure.

Once I made my way to the bottom of the gulch I started climbing up the other side, but this time I took different trails than the day before.  I was digging the quality singletrack out here and the amount of it.  I has missed some good chunks of stuff the day before.   

By the time I made it to the top of the gulch again my daylight was waning.   I did not have enough light for another run down the gulch so I cruised back to the hotel.    With the exception of a few built up stunts, my 6.6 is way more bike than is needed out here.  So I pay a little extra on the climbs, good trails are good trails and these goodies are rightout my front door.  This will not be my last ride here.

Seattle Area – Surprises On Day Once

So yesterday, I left SoCal bound to Seattle for a few weeks of work and if I got lucky, a little bit of play.  Of course there is a mountain bike involved.   I decided that the 6.6 would make this trip with me.  It is the first time I have flown with this bike and I was a little surprised when I went to put it into my handy dandy bike box.  It did not fit!   Being a long wheelbased bike both the bottom of the fork and back of the rear triangle were pushed against the ends of the box and flaring it out a little.  This was not the way I wantws to travel with this thing.  After many permutations, I finally had to take the fork out of the frame and lay it next to the down tube.  

After this the rest of the box packing when smooth.  Now there was absolutely no way to keep this bike and box under 50 pounds and avoid the overweight charge.   So I put a bunch of other stuff in there as well to get my money’s worth.

The flight went as planned and I was surprised to see awesome weather in Seattle.  Sunny and in the upper 60s, low 70s.  Freaking killer.    From the airport I went right to the job site, and did all my start day stuff: Check-in with folks, chase down equipment that was shipped here, smooze and talk up with the folks I will be working with the for the next three weeks, yada yada yada….   Several times when I was walking between buildings I was thinking this is too awesome of a day in Seattle to be working.  Surprising enough, before I knew it all of the stuff I needed to do and pretty much everything I could get done that day, was done.  

I get back to my hotel and looking out the window I could not help but think, man the sun is mighty high in the sky for this time of day.  Then it dawned on me,  the further north you are in summer the longer the days are.   Cool, I might just have enough time to squeak in a ride.   So off I went to whip the bike back together.  Before long, the big was built back up and I was rolling away from the hotel towards a perspective trail I had got some e411 on a few months back.

Well what do you know, there was a trail after all and I was surprised that it was not at all bad.  While on the short side, it was still dirt.  Dirt that I had not planned on being on today.   After riding this trail, I decided to poke around the various neighborhood streets. 

I was once again surprised when I managed to find a few neighborhood trails that meandered through the woods between the various streets and neighborhoods.  It was nothing you would want to drive but it was an incredible spring day full of sunshine, blooming flowers, green woods and I was on singletrack.   What a killer surprise.

When I got back to the hotel room there was still some daylight left in the day.  I was once again surprised when it did not get dark until around eight.   You gotta love the northern lattitudes heading into summer.  This was a mighty fine start to this trip.

“Hangover” Video from Sedona

I finally got the video for the Hangover Trail in Sedona completed.   It was pretty interesting to look at the video footage of my spill over the edge.  Man, things I remembered happening so slowly “in the moment” went by in the blink of an eye.   As with all videos, things are steeper than look, but I did not realize just how exposed some of the sections were until reviewing the footage.

Ahh, enough yapping. 

 Right Click Here to download the 128MB WMV format file that runs 9 minutes and 10 seconds.   

While you are waiting for the file to download you can check out some of my other pages and posts on Sedona

Blog Posts   Arizona Summer 2006   Arizona Winter 2007    Arizona Spring 2008

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.