Thursday, January 22, 2009

Viva la taco ride

Long live the Taco Ride! Even if we can't hit the dirt, Gif's still serves up tacos every Wednesday night. Fuller and I met up for a couple hours of black label last night. I took off a bit early and scouted Denman's in hopes that the temps and people had collaborated to make a rideable trail. It was "rideable", but not what I'd call pleasurable by any means. It was in similar shape to the Big Creek snowmobile trails. You could move and get up on it, but resistance was huge and you'd better put your pressures way down to add some float. Considering we'd still be riding some pavement, airing down that low wasn't going to be much of an option so I bailed a few hundred yards in.

Rolled up the trail to meet Fuller at the junction of Clive and Windsor Heights greenbelt trails. We opted to roll down Clive way thinking/hoping the glare ice sheets would be mostly gone. It didn't matter much to me rolling on studs, but Steve on fat tires would probably be happier if we had a bit less ice. Ran into Kent coming back the other way and chatted with him a bit. He said that RRVT was snowed in so we probably wouldn't be heading that way even if we wanted. Little did he know that I (mostly) and Fuller are pretty pig headed when trying to get from point A to B. The connector portion from the greenbelt to RRVT was indeed snowed in and hadn't been plowed all season from the looks of it. We busted some trail and tried to dodge frozen footsteps by riding the deep powder on the sides of the trail. Eventually we ground our way up to the main trail only to find 1 short section had been plowed for a couple blocks and then it was back to nothing. At that point we threw in the towel and hit the road.

We opted to head through Country Club and follow the back end of my old west side road loop to hook back up with WDM trails over by the other bike shop on the west side. Fuller must've been going for some heroics as he opted to head back towards Rassy's where I parked in lieu of heading towards home at this point. Somewhere rolling along EP True I felt the need for some refreshment. Apparently we were sharing a similar thought and we headed to Gif's for tacos and beer. We capped off the evening with a couple other taco riders that showed up (albeit NOT on bike) in the form of Al and Hal. After drying our sweaty selves out for near an hour, we headed back to the shop and Fuller continued on home. A better way to kill 2 hours, I can't think of.

3 comments:

Courtney Hilton said...

You guys didn't ride very long I went home and got my mountian bike after I talked to you and rode until 7:30 and headed down to giffs the bar tender said I just missed a couple other riders that must have been you.

Steve Fuller said...

Courtney, I was out a total of 2.5 hours not counting the stop at Giffs. Not terribly long, but certainly not short. :) Rick, did you happen to get mileage for that day's ride? I'm trying to be a little more type A about tracking this stuff. I'm guessing around 30 or so for me with the ride home.

Buckshot77 said...

I had 19.8 miles with an average of 11.4 for that ride.