May 31, 2008

Alta: South Mountain - Phoenix Mountain Biking

A group of MTBR riders meet up at 7:00 for a little ride up and down and up and down Alta this morning. As I've written before (here and here) this is a pretty sketchy trail . We started our ride at the San Juan - Telegraph Pass Rd Gate, which was fine, but I was oblivious to the fact that the gate was open. Meaning we could've started the ride at the end of San Juan Rd. This is nice, cuz you finish the ride with a downhill.

We've put off the heat so far this year, but I think all this coolness came to an end today. It is time to acclimated to riding in the heat.

The ride up was super fast, and it was nice to be on top. Except there was no breeze, and no shade.

The ride across the ridge over to the other pass pretty uber fun.

The ride off the second pass got turned a little sour about 2 minutes into the ride down, as NoelG took nasty fall on a switchback. His hand was really messed up. He kept calm, knowing his hand might be broken. And here's a look at his xrays. We still had a lot of riding down, so this wasn't a good place to have a hand out of commission. I didn't get to see him off, cuz I had my first flat tire in about year to tend to. Some how, I tore a whole at the base of the valve stem.

This wasn't the only flat, as DurtGurl, who was running tubeless went totally flat too. Forcing her to drop a tube in. The only problem was that her replacement tube freakin' a nasty whole in it. And I had used my spare. Her patch didn't take, so Dgangi road back up the trail and hooked her up with a spare.

From here, we made our was back down to the end of San Juan road. We then road National back to the other side of the hill. From here half the group jumped on the Bajada Trail, and the others (myself included) took the road back to the car.

Heal up Noel!

With all the carnage and flat tires, I missed some really choose vid shots, but here is vid of the day:

And for the patient, here's a high res - Alta Trail Ride Quicktime Version (it'll take about 4 or 5 minutes to load up)

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