07-20-08 Post Canyon...of course

Weather is still awesome, so we ride post canyon as much as we can till the snow and rain comes back.

Jake, Andy, Darren (first ride in two months) sterling (jake's brother), raul, chris and myself headed out to post. We hooked up with a couple guys, tony and shawn.

I did the stop by jake's house and jake is not awake or answering the door, so I slept on his driveway for about thirty minutes or so until he came outside. He made coffee, then we headed to Andy's place.

Darren was back in mid season form after just a few minutes, he hit both the right and left side of all the chorus jumps. he was even working on the pause mid whip...was looking nice!

Andy was having a good day until a little knock on the knee from one of the legs of his fork. He was rolling into the chorus jumps...I know he's got these jumps, he's just got to roll off em.

Raul hit the egg hunt drop for the first time this afternoon. here's the video:

Raul was plenty excited as you can hear from the video clip. I'm sure he will be killing all the jumps on chorus next.

It turns out that the little crash tony had on the first part of extended play ended up with him having a broken shoulder. this is a tough dude, he hardly said a work and even finished out the ride...with a broken friggin shoulder!

Weather was awesome, riding was awesome and we finished out the day with some taco's at Andy's house that were so good, not even the Mexican's could have made them that good! we will ride again soon!

Post Canyon 07-13-08

Jake picked me up at eight and we headed to Post Canyon. Weather was perfect...hardly a cloud in the sky. We picked up Andy on the way in. Hack, Fatlarry, Skinny April and chip were waiting our arrival out at post.

we headed out in andy's little honda since it was the only rig that we had that could carry more than two bikes. the maing bus has some bad vibration in the rear end...and not in the good way that is keeping it from carrying us to the trails.

I always love checking out the highway on the washington side while driving out to the gorge. i also want to get some good shots of the old rail road tressel that is on the washington side. hack has actually got some good images of the gorge off the bridge shown in this picture.

we headed up to the top of the mountain the check out the upcoming super d race course that is happening next weekend. a few of us we interested in racing it, but after riding it today....none of us are going to race it. today's ride was punishment enough!

when we got up to the top of the mountain, we ran into the gi joe's crew. i don't think i had seem DH Ian for over a year. I haven't been riding in Whistler enough i guess?

this was a shot from the top middle part of the super d course....holy moly it was hot! after finishing out the super d course, we piled into the back of chips truck

this picture was just taken a few minutes before we were pulled over by the local police and lectured about how dangerous it was to ride in the back of a truck. so we did the immigrant thing and piled all sevem of us into the cab that is supposed to only hold five. i think fat larry's leg is still numb.

On out second run we split up...most of the guys went down the dh trail and I...stupidly by myself went down the jump line. I had a small crash on the upper part of chorus. roots hurt when you try and stop yourself by slamming your knee and ankle into them while your bike falls out from under you. my leg is killing me as i sit here typing this.

despite the crash, i was still feeling pretty good. hack got a few shots of me trying to do a few more tricks.

The one footer was fun and actually pretty easy. i don't remember ever trying a one footer over this jump. This one went o.k. so i tried to get better extension on the 3 star...hack got this shot.

not bad, but i have to get that hand extended out better. darren should be back riding soon and he is always good influence to push me learning tricks.

on our first run up top, chip pointed out a small forest fire towards mt. adams. by the end of the day this sucker was huge. we saw it grow from a little fire that we could barely see any smoke....to a fire that had a plume of smoke probably 12,000 feet high! this shot was taken from just outside troutdale looking back towards hood river and you can see the smoke from a long ways away. crazy. i hope that fire is under control by now!

andy's little maing bus did a great job getting us to the the top of the hill and back.

jake was very tired.

andy was tired before we left the trails!

It was another epic day of riding in Hood River. I sure hope that everybody has something they do that is this much fun. I can't wait to get back!

07/04 and 07/05 Post Canyon

There have been a few rides that i've done since the Whistler ride and yep...no pictures. too busy riding and not snapping any pics. But we did go to Post and work on some shots for the upcoming video.

I picked up hack and raul around four o'clock and headed out to post. When we arrrived in post, Todd McCarthy was in some beer garden in town and had been drinking. who knows how many, but he was in great spirits. We headed up and did a run down the technical rocky trail. We experimented with the boner cam.

I think everybody has to do a bit of riding with this thing on to get used to it. Raul had the camera yank down on his helmet when he was doing a run and it squished his goggles down to his mouth...made for some good footage.

JR brought his beagle/lab dog. this guy eats cheese like a champ. He was giving us hell the entire time. i don't think he ever did poop in the truck like we were hoping??

we did a bunch of filming right here near the top of the mountain. the clouds/fog were very sweet looking with the occasional break where you could see all the way down to the hood river bridge.

We did a couple late night runs from the campsite up top down to the bottom of chorus. Todd did his runs with no lights, trying to stay between two people that had lights or riding over the person with lights that crashed in front of him. Big time crazy points to todd for doing the hardest trail on the mountain in the dark, after drinking beer with no lights!!! I was my usual ride better when i can't see where hack is taking me. I cleaned the entire line in the dark with no hesitation. i guess i should only ride rocky steep trails when i can't see what i'm riding.

none of us remembered to bring cooking utensils, but i did have my samurai training

saturday morning we got up and did the donut breakfast thanks to raul. he is the most prepared camper i've ever seen...except for the spatula of which i used one of the trail building machetes from the maing bus. see above image. while cooking we heckled as many people via cell phone that we could remember numbers of.

We headed down from the campsite to meet with all the people that were going to show up for the ride. We got to family man right at nine and not a sole was there. no craig, no kevin, no terry, no jim not even robholio? we had no choice but to wait. finally about ten o'clock jim showed up and shortly after terry showed up. i'm not sure if it was the rain back in town that scared everybody away, but they missed some very nice conditions on the trails.
hack got this shot of raul heading into the fog. this great shot sums up the weekend, great! too bad for all the guys that missed out!