BIG Bear RR 05/28

by throttlepimpin Tue May 31, 2011 9:07 am

Saturday: Drove up in morning and dropped off all nonessential gear at a buddies cabin. Then headed over to Snow Summit resort and purchased our lift passes.

First trail was Pirates lite, some single track some fire road and some single track. Conditions, It's dusty, not as dusty as the end of last season, dusty non the less. Losts of chunk and some new treefall, most of which has already been chainsawed to clear trails.

Then on to Pirates proper all single track and moderate steeps. Everyone is having a good time.

Next on the agenda log drop trail. To get here you go through cables over the log roller down what we call coke hill (white powdery steep) and make a left at the big wash out berm. Usually your going so fast it's more of a 270 degree right. pedal up a little bit of fireroad. At the entrance to this trail is a downed log skinny about 5 feet long and a 2 foot drop at the end then single track, steep, log drop, log drop, steep, log drop log drop single track. Our run involved carnage, on the second set of log drops I lost the front right before the steep section. Dave manged to slow down enough not to run me over only to get plowed from behind by Chip who went flying off the last drop. Only scrapes and bruises and lots of laughing. You could hear Chip coming, first drop"oh fuck" , second drop "OH FUCK", hits Dave "SORRY BRO" as Dave is literally in mid tumble legs akimbo feet flailing above his head. Both Chip and I got video, Chips helmet cam and my chest cam provided laughter well into the night (I'll get a link when Chip finishes editing the video).

Looks like some gnomes got in there and fixed a lot of the log drop trail, last rear it was pretty rough and there is a nice little double towards the end of the trail that wasn't there last year.

We head back up to run down another trail I call rollercaoster, it's almost all G-outs winding down through a valley a little farther along the fireroad past log drops. Only my rear shock has lost almost all pressure and we've got no shock pump on us. I take the slow lift ride back down as they hit another run on something else since I was the only one who knew where rollercoaster is in our group.

Brendan who is our cabin guy has a huge off on this last run. He get's caught up in some manzinita that grabbed his bar enough to send him off, hard. So hard that when he gathers himself back up and grabs his bike the rear wheel is missing. Some how in the maylay the real wheel managed to pop completely out of the rear. Crash of the day now goes to Bren. He sets the wheel back in and meets the group back at the truck where we call it a day.

Sunday: We wake to see near freezing temps outside. It rains a little, the sun pops out then disappears and the wind is staring to howl. We decide to get breakfast, and see if it'll warm up. We're not to worried about the cold while riding, it's the being exposed on the lift we're bitching about. Ahhh the gondolas of Mammoth... Weather report said chance of snow. We can see the mountain from a breakfast spot and it's covered in blowing clouds. We can only assume that the bits of sprinkles we're getting at the base are biting flurrys on the mountain and call it no joy.

No worries we didn't pay for a room thanks to Bren and although I broke a front fork (cracked lower housing) and suffered a blown rear shock I had a great time doing it and am looking forward to many more rides at Big Bear this season!!!

Now go read my other post about how totally fucking awesome Drake and Rob at ISO tune are!