Single Track

Matt beat me to the punch to blog about our mountain bike ride on Saturday.  He dragged me (quite willingly) to ride some "new to me" trails.  I've decided that I just might be able to conquer this mountain bike thing afterall.  Well, eventually that is.

We first rode through the Mentone Wash on some flat single track.  I'm finding that my control on the mountain bike is lacking, just a bit... Per Matt, I guess I can ride a straight line.  It's riding a not so straight line, that I need to practice.  Getting around the rocks quickly, and not putting on the brakes to skid to a stop when something looks especially challenging is what I need to work on.

Once we reached Greenspot Road, we headed up to Lower Workout Trail which is at the base of the mountains.  I huffed my way up a washed out road (huffing partly out of some kind of mild fear of biting it).  Lower Workout is a rolling climb along the side of the mountains.  I only freaked out a couple of times.  And although it was pretty overgrown in some places, it was beautiful with wild flowers.  Matt took some cheesy pics of me on the trail (which will remain unpublished) and I took some less cheesy pics of him. He, of course, accused me of taking multiple to get flowers in the picture, but I claim innocence.

We headed down to the wash, only to find out that the melting mountian has created a raging river there.  After several attempts to cross the river (which I unfortunately did not document on film) involving taking our shoes off (neither of us like riding in wet shoes) and attempting to wade through what we thought would be shallower spots (not the case), we finally gave up and rode toward Crafton along the levy.  Matt tricked me into riding up a "easy" single track to Zanja Peak.  After several near death experiences, I made it to the top.  By this time, my nerves were shot and after momentary consideration of riding down another single track, I opted to take the main WIDE trail to Crafton College.

I survived!  And, I must say, I rode the mountain bike three times last week, and the road bike only once.  I think I'm being converted.