Mammoth - Day Two

It's time for the ride report for day two at Mammoth ...

I explained in the last post the problems I was having with my shoes and pedals, which is important because it came into play over and over throughout the weekend. It definitely made an impact on the second ride of day two.

The plan for day two was to buy a "pedal pass" to cruise around the mountain and then to do ... well we didn't have a plan for after that.

The overall plan was to save the downhill runs for the last day just in case we got hurt. That way we would have broken bones at the end of the trip so we wouldn't miss out on that much. Day two was going to be a climbing and exploration day.


Ride One:

After we picked up our passes we decided to go up Uptown and then over to Beach Cruiser to a small lake. Then we would go around the lake and come back down Beach Cruiser and then go across the mountain back to the condo. That was the plan.

The trip up Uptown was pretty fast. I think we finished the climb in about 40 minutes. I watched my Garmin on the way up and it seemed like we were averaging around a 7 MPH pace. That's not bad considering the elevation.

The effort expended for the first half of the climb was pretty minimal actually. I kept it in my middle ring for the most part, but had to gear down in a few sections. I'm starting to learn to push hard in a high gear for a while and then spin down to recover. Rinse and repeat this for a long climb and enjoy success. The trick is to increase the duration of the "pushing" and to decrease the resting over time. I guess the official name for this approach is "intervals".

The trip up Beach Cruiser was pretty uneventful minus one biff on a switchback. I actually hit the dirt pretty hard and it bugged me for a while. My left hand suffered a lot on this trip because I was constantly falling on it with all my body weight.

We got to the lake and checked it out before continuing on to "the cliffs". Last year my friends and I took a bunch of pictures near these cliffs with our bikes and they turned out really well. So we did the same thing this year. The pictures make us look more hardcore than we really are. Haha.

Me on the cliff:



I don't remember much about going across the mountain on the way back to the condo for lunch. The pace was starting to get faster on the downhill though as everyone became more confident with the terrain.

Corby ended up endo'ing on Paper Route on the way back to the condo. I do believe that is his first "over the bars" experience. Good for him. It's good to get a few good falls in because they help you to realize it's not all that bad. You become more willing to take risks when you realize the penalty isn't as bad as you thought it would be.

We ended up back at the condo where we ate lunch and took naps. In that order. Poor Andrew had his rear de-railleur cable get severed, so instead of napping he had to replace his cable.

We also played around a bit in the stunt park at the bottom of Beach Cruiser. I only attempted "The Dragon", but Matt rode over a bunch of stuff. I didn't quite make the full dragon. I got halfway up the second ramp and fell over. Ha.

Matt on teeter-totter:



Me on the dragon:





Ride Two:

The second ride of the day was Lower Rock Creek. I had seen a bunch of people post the ride on Geoladders while I was doing research for Mammoth and figured it would be a good trail to try. It had a reputation for being pure awesomeness, so everyone was excited to see how good it really was.

I called a local bike shop and got directions and info about how long and tough it was. The information wasn't great, but I figured it was good enough.

The guy at the shop on the phone told me it was less than 10 miles for the climb and then the same 10 miles back. He also said it should take less than 3 hours and that it was "moderately" technical. Oh, he also told us where to turn off the freeway as well.

TUrns out the guy was wrong on every point. It was shorter than 10 miles, it is very hard to do in 3 hours and it was more than moderately technical in many sections. Also he was wrong about where to turn and park. Thanks guy.

We finally got to the bottom of the trail and started riding at about 5PM. We got lost and spent almost an hour trying to find the trail, so that hurt our chances of being able to finish the entire ride. However we did consider that we were above average riders and that maybe - just maybe - we could do it all in 2 hours instead of 3.

Wrong.

The ride started just fine. It was singletrack and had some fun little technical obstacles that were tough, but not so hard that they couldn't be conquered. I would say it was a similar to Trabuco as far as the climbing experience went. Frustrating at times, but also rewarding.

After the first mile or so the fun ended abruptly. What followed was a variation of the following sequence:

- Look ahead 5 feet
- Realize the section is not rideable
- Hike over rocks
- Look ahead 5 feet
- Ride 10 feet
- Andrew breaking his chain (ok this only happened once)

I swear we must have ridden only maybe 20 yards at most on any given section of the trail after the first mile. Everyone was starting to get frustrated too because it was seemingly never ending. Most trails have sections that require hiking - but they are just that ... sections. Not an entire trail.
The other thing that made this ride tough was how narrow the singletrack was. It was very tight in quite a few sections and it made hiking/riding that much harder.

Rideable section:



At about 6:30PM we decided to call it quits. We were only about 3.5 miles into the trail and it showed no signs of getting easier. We needed to get back before dark and unfortunately there was no place to "bail" to. I failed to mention this earlier in the post, but the entire trail was alongside a creek that ran through a deep ravine. There was no way we could hike to a road or a fire road etc.

I was pretty upset that we were going to turn around because I love to _finish_ rides, but we didn't have a choice. At this point I was pretty upset too because the trail had not been fun at all.

The ride back made up for it though. It was a blast. I rode maybe 90-95% of it whereas on the climb I would say I rode 65-70%. It felt great to ride over some technical stuff and clear it without any problems. The Los Pinos/Bell Ridge rides really helped out my downhill skills considerably.


By the time we got back to the condo everyone was pretty tired. We ended up eating Japanese for dinner before crashing. Day two was the climbing day which meant that day three would be the DOWNHILL DAY!

Day three coming soon ...