Friday night I met Kris and Mark (a friend from my neighborhood, not to be confused with my other friend and co-worker Mark) for a continuation of last week's tour of Corner Canyon. Mark recently moved to Utah from Arizona (referring to the Mark from my neighborhood, not to be confused with the other Mark who recently moved to Utah from Idaho) and is in the process of getting to know the local trails. As much as I hate moving it would almost be worth the hassle and expense just to experience another season of first rides. On our first ride I took him up Clark's and then up to the top of Jacob's Ladder. It was about 10 seconds into the descent that I realized he was much faster than me on the downhill. After 30 seconds I lost sight of him. We'd regroup when the trail split but all the way down Ghost Falls and continuing back to the Equestrian Center he continued to rip.
Well, the same pattern repeated itself this Friday as we rode an out-and-back on the BST to Bear Canyon, then up the dirt road to Ghost Falls, down Ghost and over to Silica Pit to lower Clark's to the BST where we headed west to Spring Hollow. New trail or not, he was ripping the downhill. Once the Draper ICUP course is officially marked I need to take him out again so he can show me all the sweet lines!
I saw the small gopher snake in the picture above coiled to the side of the trail as we finished our out-and-back on the northern BST and couldn't resist stopping to pick him for a quick picture. My 8 year old son loves snakes (and frogs, lizards, insects, spiders, etc.) and would have never forgiven me had I not taken a picture!
Saturday I hit the pavement for a road ride up American Fork Canyon via the north and south sides of Suncrest. I met up with Mark (my co-worker and recent transplant from Idaho) in Alpine for a full gas attempt to chase down the small group he had left to join up with me. Unfortunately I didn't have the legs to help him chase and it wasn't long after we began climbing American Fork Canyon that I completely exploded.
I continued slowly to the Tibble Fork junction where I flipped a U-turn and headed back home. The descent out the canyon and west on the Alpine Highway wasn't bad but as soon as I began climbing the south side of Suncrest I could tell I was in trouble. My legs were fried but I resisted the urge to call my wife and request a pick-up and slowly made my way up the climb. At the top I again contemplated an extraction but figured it was silly to stop at the top of a big hill so continued on. In Bluffdale I was again tempted to abort once the long descent finally ended but given that I only had a few miles to go at that point I talked myself into continuing. Arriving home after more than 4,300 feet of climbing over the course of 3.5 hours I was cooked!
1 comment:
Sounds like a good ride. By the way that is much smaller than the snake I found on BST but about the same size as the one in my back yard.
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