Okay, so it's hard to really "freeride" in Florida, but
Santos (near Ocala) is the closest thing we have to it. It
consists of tame XC trails with modest elevation, some short
dirt jumps, and some real big stuff (10-30 foot drops).
There are also a couple of drops that have been converted
into really steep (75 degrees or so) 30' rollable descents.
So I convince my roommate Greg to come with us on his Giant
Rainier... he's reluctant at first because he's convinced
his fork will cause him to crash since it bottoms out just
by leaning on it. But we head out and arrive at the trail
and proceed to ride to the fun stuff. Some XC stuff for
about 30 seconds before Jon on his Big Hit loses his NDS
crank! Turns out Specialized has been shipping out Big Hits
with stripped crank bolts and stripped bottom bracket
spindle threads. This ends his performance day and he
becomes obligatory cameraman for Cabe, whose Cannondale Team
DH bike is ready for anything he can dish out.
We play around in the rocky woods for a while before heading
out to the rock quarry. This is where the fun drops, dirt
jumps, and rideable descents are. But Greg does a hop off
the lip of a pothole and promptly loses his Powerlink (damn
it!!!). We search in the gravel for about 5 minutes and find
it and head back out to the quarry.
We find that since there's a freeride competition on Sunday,
there have been some wooden jumps made specifically for the
competition, and we have our fun with them. There's two 3'
high boards, made at progressively higher angles, to
catapult you up about 10' up a small cliff. Fortunately, it
lands in some thin, yet dense ground-covering vines that act
like a nest in case you land it wrong... which Greg did
pretty badly. No injury though. Having never done any upward
jumps (only off dropoffs), this was quite the new
experience. But wow... kickass air and landing at just the
right angle and speed is niiiice.
I crashed on the rideable drop (video coming soon), and
Cabe dropped the big 20' drop (onto a transition, of
course) with no ill effects. At the end, we did a XC loop,
and the 40-lb AC1 is actually very good for XC because I
don't ever need to worry about standing up 😉 Then again,
the AC is 43% heavier than the XTC, but it doesn't bounce
around and go off-course like the XTC does. All in all, the
ride was primo.
--
Phil, Squid-in-Training