soul rides

they just aren't something you can plan. pretty hard to define too. sometimes its about hammering for an hour and making every climb and just putting down the fastest time of your life. sometimes its about riding dabless over your most technical trails. sometimes its hours on end of riding until you forget about the world. regardless, its always about a ride that leaves you with nothing but a smile and a reminder of why you do this. today was somewhere in the middle of all that. 4 hours of riding on literally 99% singletrack without leaving city limits. it was cold...damn cold last night and that left the leaf-covered trails nice and slippery. spent the first two hours of the ride practicing my two-wheel drifting technique and hammering out a real common loop for the locals, then rode it backwards and did a few more things then headed back to the apt for some leftover chili. the apt is about 2 minutes from the trailhead which is fairly convenient when doing this long of a ride over the lunch hour. then headed back out for another 2 hours. this time the trail was drying up and carrying speed was easier, but climbing got way harder. climbing here is always hard...3 hours in it gets brutal. but the weather was amazing. the color in the trees and leaves is almost gone but the sun was shining and it was somewhere around 40 degrees when i started and 50 when i ended. that and the day started out picking up a couple new goodies from the shop for the jabber. in the 4 hours i rode i saw probably 8 deer, never more than two at a time, two pairs of turkeys and the biggest "oh shit" moment came as i railed through a corner, i pod blasting, eyes looking too close to my front wheel when something caught my attention just in time. a flock (gaggle? i don't hunt) of about 10 turkeys right in middle of the trail. pretty well locked up the brakes and skidded to a stop and the turkeys scattered in every direction. i'm sure the look on my face was comical, so i had a short laugh at myself and headed on down the trail.

almost 3 hours in, about to climb larson's. yuck.

one of my 17 required pieces of flare. i'm working on 32.

if the bike was clean and you could see it in person, its almost as if crank brothers should have named their iodine color molten brimstone.

yes, its a road stem. get over it. its light, not carbon and the "red" is pushing an orange tint that also works awesome with the paint. the carbon wrap on my titec pluto stem was actually flaking of like shitty paint.