taking enthusiastic gals out on the trail. Katy is an refugee from spin
class, and a neighborhood mom. I'm not sure when her actual first ride was,
but I've taken her out to Riverside a few time with some of the other gals,
and hooked her up once with the weekly gals ride that I was going on.
She's fit, and she's excited to ride, I think she's getting the bug.
I took her up to Beacon today, which is a step up the ability ladder for
both the amount of climbing, and the interesting things you find on the
trails. She ate it up! Two miles up to the top, no problem. There were a
couple of exciting moments when I promised to show her the easy line on
things, then I forgot (oops) and her stopping caused a group pile up. (
oops). But we got it all sorted out. She's all grins, and "I want to learn
how to do that". My biggest concern when taking someone up here for the
first time is that they have fun and not get freaked out. If someone's not
in shape the hills will just kill them, and if they are used to totally
non-technical they will be in for a few surprises. She did great on both
account.
We took her down to the playground - Gab knows this trail- which is just a
lot of little granite slick rock boulders that you ride in a loop. Round and
round, Katy gets a feel for how to go up and down the boulders. The rest of
us work on jumping off this one rock. Then, we lose two riders who have to
get back to work so they hit the bike path back to the car. The rest of us
head back up the ridge, stopping to point out the Rushmore drop - yes,
people really do ride their bikes off that thing - back into the forest, up
the switch backs, back to towers.
Up at the towers it's kind of a bummer. It's being logged in there, and the
guy mentioned as we are riding through that this one area is getting carved
up into 5 acre lots for what I can only assume is going to be mcmansions.
In the scheme of things, this is only a small part of the area we ride
there, and I think it's going to be to late to get "organized" to do
anything about it. I certainly can't take on any more projects with the new
club, maybe this will bring some other good folks on board.
Where were we? Oh yeah, the towers. Now, it's two miles of downhill, all
non-steep with lots of S curves and banked corners... whoo-hoo, here we go.
We get to the bottom, and she says " Man, that was great!"
Dam straight it was!!
penny