someguy said:caught in bad weather / injuries etc.. I have had 2-
Actually I've never really had a very bad ride. But these are the worst I
can think of. Coincidentally, they were both when we had visitors in town
(for business). We had unintentionally developed a long-running reputation
for abusing visitors!
Probably the worst ride was one that started off with this long, long
downhill. It had all sorts of switchbacks and obstacles, but was generally
rideable for average skilled riders as long as it was dry. It was
mid-summer and hadn't rained in several days, so it should've been dry. We
were riding with a friend from Israel who'd done some mountain biking. I
talked him into wearing an extra pair of gloves. It wasn't dry at all! The
trail was slippery as hell - it was like a layer of slime on the top!
Rarely did we manage a switchback without at least one bike going down.
The Israeli returned my gloves, covered in mud...apparently he'd gone down
quite a few times! He was shivering and hadn't taken a drink the whole
ride, but was otherwise OK. One other guy was peeing blood after this
ride, but he healed in a couple of days.
Next to that was a fireroad & singletrack ride that had lots of tough
climbs (http://bbauer.gomen.org/fpark/f12-newton.jpg going clockwise), but
our visitor (from Sacramento, CA) said he'd done a lot of mountain biking.
We hadn't realized how much different it is in Oregon, I guess. We got to
the bottom of a very long downhill (just fireroad), and our visitor was
just starting his descent. And then he freaked. I'm not sure if he used
his brakes or not, because he just kept getting faster and faster. He let
out this yell that just kept getting higher and higher pitch, until BOOM!
He'd been veering left the whole time until finally he hit this ~3-foot
tall log, and shot off into the woods. We lost sight of him in the trees.
He came out of it without a scratch! Then it really started raining hard.
We still had the long climb to go, but he refused to go any further with
us. He sat there in the rain for ~45 minutes while we struggled up the
steep, loose (and now very slippery) climb!
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