Bike Park Action

Short Version:
We borrow bikes and ride down a mountain

Long Version:
Breakfast is a routine we have down to a fine art. It's usually quite a nice, relaxing, pre-frenzy time of day.

Not so much so when it's accompanied by ravening hordes of mosquitoes which are quite prepared to bite through multiple layers of clothes.

Still, it meant we broke camp and left nice and early, which is a change, and were at the Ellsworth demo stand at Whistler before most of the crowds had materialised*. The bloke at the stand decided to put me on a 29"-wheel Evolution, which was a thing of beauty, as was the Momentum they put Janine on. Neither was as beautiful as their full-carbon single-speed Enlightenment, but we were heading up the mountain on the chairlift, then riding back down, which is most definitely not what the Enlightenment is designed for. Beautiful though, and with some pretty fancypants technologickal specialness going on to boot.

We were pretty nervous as we joined the queue for the chairlift, and were feeling fairly significantly out of place with our XC helmets, clipless** pedals and bare limbs*** among the near-unanimously full body-armor and full-face helmet crowd. The loading process was - thankfully - fairly self-evident, with every second chair set up as bike-only, and equipped to take up to four bikes. The chair comes into the station, and the riders fall in behind it. The three right-hand riders load their bikes into wheel-cradles, so the three bikes stand upright side-by-side unassisted. The left-hand rider hangs his/her bike by the front wheel from a hook on the side of the chair. It travels up the hill suspended vertically. The riders wait for the next chair to come through and hit them in the back of the knees, then sit in relative comfort, unencumbered by bikes and able to chat, watch other riders screaming (some literally) down the hill, and look at scenery (of which there is plenty). Unloading at the top is achieved with a little help from (almost always Australian) lift operators, who unload the four bikes as the bike chair comes through, then hold them until their owners arrive. You then get the hell out of the way before the next chair full of bikes arrives.

First crack at chairlift-assisted downhill riding was possibly not the best time for me to be trying the big-wheeler, which - unsurprisingly - handled quite differently from the 26"-wheel bikes I've been riding all these years. Might have been better on a second run, but the lift queues were long and we had limited time with the bikes, so we dropped them back, not forgetting to remind them we'd had them swap the brakes around for us****.

Next stop was the Giant tent, where we picked up a pair of Faiths. Discovered while the mechanics were swapping the brakes for us that the guy who runs the workshop for their pro team drives cement trucks in the off-season. The bikes were stupidly heavy, and correspondingly difficult to load onto the chairlift, but turned out to be very good at eating bumpy terrain and soaking up impacts from landings off the jumps we were hitting with more and more confidence, which meant more speed, which in turn meant more height off the lip and more time in the air. By the end of this run we were starting to see the attraction of big bikes - although only for places where there's a viable way to get to the top of the trail without riding the monstrosities up.

We dropped the bikes back and then - after a minor heart attack when the counter-girl couldn't find my Driving Licence and credit card (our last remaining one of each) which had been left there as security - we drove to nearby Alta Lake, where we picnicked and swam and lay in the sun reading books. And sleeping, which may or may not have included some snoring.








* = Judging from the amount of broken glass and other detritus the parking lot folks were starting to clean up, we suspect many people might have still been sleeping, some in puddles of their own (or others') vomit

** = I wondered for some time about why the pedals where one "clips in" to one's bicycle are referred to as "clipless." According to Mr Wikipedia: "Clipless refers to the lack of an external toe clip (cage)... not to be confused with platform pedals without toe clips."

*** = Janine had her volleyball knee-pads on, but they're not quite the same

**** = I always thought it was Europe which had the brakes swapped from NZ-normal, but it turns out it's North Amerika. They refer to the way we arrange things as "running moto," as our setup is the same as that of a motorcycle. I asked a number of people about the origins of the setup discrepancy before I found someone prepared to hazard a guess that it may be related to being able to brake safely while executing a hand-signal for a turn, combined with the relative importance of left- and right-hand turns depending on which side of the road one is riding. Sounded plausible after a wine or three