Inconvenient Wind

Short Version:
Back in the Reaper, we head to an internationally-renowned mountain-biking destination, where we experience inconvenient wind.

Long Version:
Boulder City was built back in the 1930s to provide accommodation and services for workers involved in the construction of the nearby Hoover Dam. Nowdays it's a bit of a mixed-bag: dormitory town for the ever-expanding menace that is Las Vegas*; Hoover Dam tourism centre; birthplace of Playboy's May 1998 Playmate Deanna Brooks; sixth-best place in the USA to retire to; and - most importantly for our purposes - home of the Bootleg Canyon mountain-bike park, which kind of made it a near-mandatory stop for us despite their traditional focus on downhill trails rather than cross-country / all-mountain, which is where we fit when pigeonholed.

The main trailhead area is well-equipped with flush toilets(!) and showers(!!!), so we parked up and settled in for a couple of days of riding hard in our new, temporary back yard.

The wind had other ideas.

Not much point digging out official definitions of "gale force"**, as we had no way to measure what we were experiencing. The van was rocking, and not cos of us: we read books.

We did manage a 90-minute ride, and we could tell that there was some great riding to be had, but the wind was nasty, and kind of ruined the fun. What we did ride was loose-over-hardpack interspersed with sections of rock that looked scarier and less rideable than they really were. In the end, though, Boulder City goes down in our annals as the place we went straight after the luxury hotel experience, and where we spent two days shut in the Reaper while the wind howled outside. Quite a contrast.










* = With around two million inhabitants, Vegas is now Amerika's 28th-largest city, and grew the most of all US cities during the 20th century (it inherited that mantle from Chicago, which was the fastest-growing city during the 19th century)

** = 62-74kph; 8 on the Beaufort scale***.

*** = v = 0.836 B3/2 m/s, where v is the equivalent wind speed at 10 meters above the sea surface and B is Beaufort scale number.