Mammoth - Day One

In order to make things nice and neat, I figured I'd write one post per day of riding at Mammoth this past weekend.

I went up to Mammoth last Thursday with Matt, Andrew and Corby. We stayed in a condo which served as our base camp for a long weekend of riding. Melissa, James, Josiah and Kirstie also came up and stayed in the condo, but we didn't do any riding with them, so they'll be left out of the rest of the posts for the most part. Ha.

We rolled into Mammoth on day one somewhere between 2PM and 3PM. The condo wasn't ready so we drove around a bit and killed some time. When the condo was finally ready we dropped our stuff off and quickly hit the trails.

A quick detour from the narrative ... The shoes I've been using for the past 1.5 years have finally died. Both shoes have huge holes in them and no tread left on the bottom. I didn't realize how bad the tread was until I bought new shoes this past week. I wanted to get new shoes for Mammoth because somehow I thought it would make the riding better. Wrong.

In addition to the new shoes I bought new pedals. I didn't want to wrestle with the cleats on my old shoes so I was able to justify buying eggbeaters. I've heard they are generally better then SPD's, so I figured it was good timing.

I'm still forming my opinion on the new pedals though, so I'll save that for a later post.

The reason I mention the new shoes and pedals is that I had a total of four "accidents" on the trip. Three of them came on day one.

The first accident was from just riding in circles in the parking lot of the condo's management office. I was doing circles and started to lean to the left and was unable to unclip. BOOM. I ate it hard on the pavement right in front of a family that had just checked in. Embarrassing and painful. I got a small bruise on my left hip/thigh from that one as well as a few scrapes.

Accident number two came on the trail. Not quite as bad. Again I was leaning to the left and I couldn't unclip. Bam. Into the dirt on a sandy switchback. Bummer.

The last accident on day one was in the underground parking lot. Andrew was riding straight for me as we were doing circles and I didn't know what to do. He wasn't braking or moving and I didn't want to collide so I went to unclip. Oops. I ate it hard on the concrete once more.

I had put shims in on the bottom of the shoes because Troy had recommended it, but they didn't seem to help much. In fact I ended up taking the shims out after day one because my feet kept coming out on the climbs. Funny how that works ... feet coming out on climbs and NOT coming out when I start to crash. Worst of both worlds.

Anyways on to the ride for day one ...

We decided to ride up a trail called Juniper because it was close to the condo and because it was free. Mammoth requires a "pedal pass" if you want to ride on their official trails and since we didn't have one, we would limit ourselves to the open and free trails.

The trail started right away with a climb. The nice thing is that the entire trail was a singletrack. The bad thing was that a lot of the trail was very loose and sandy. This would be a theme for the weekend.

The elevation at Mammoth got to me a little on the first ride of day one, but for the most part I was ok. We rode to a series of lakes - just like last year actually - and then cruised back through the park before heading back to the condo. We did poach a little, but no one was out and we made it through without any trouble from "the man".

It was a good ride to get us in shape for the next two days. Apparently the pace was a little fast, but I couldn't help it. I was trying to ease up so that I wouldn't burn myself out, but instinct kicked in at some point. I've been in "push" mode for a while, but I really did try to relax more and slow the pace down. Overall I would say the ride took very little out of me.

Album:

Mammoth 07