I was in Utah a full 30 hours before I went on a mountain bike ride, so you’ve got to admire my personal restraint and single-minded focus on my new job.

Preparing for the Ride

I met Kenny, Bry, and Rick at the parking lot of the Grove Canyon Trail. We all just call it “Grove,” though. Kenny was putting the final touches on my brand new, never-rode-it-before bike: a Fisher Paragon. And by “final touches,” I mean that he had put about fifteen extra reflectors on it.

Cute.

By getting a Paragon, I had completed my assimilation into the group. All four of us were riding 29" Paragons. Two yellow (this year’s color), two deep red (last year’s color).

Sadly, Rick had forgotten his helmet and bike shoes. This would not have happened if Rick would learn and use what I like to call “The Mountain Bike Checklist Ditty.” It goes like this:

The Mountain Bike Checklist Ditty

Air pressure, lube and tube

Don’t forget the CO2

Water in the bottle too

Always wear a helmet!

 

Shoes and socks and shorts and shirt

Cell phone in case you get hurt

MTB, ride on the dirt

Now you’re set to go!

copyright 2006 Fat Cyclist Productions. All rights reserved

OK, I admit: I just made up that ditty. But (I’ll further admit), I’m now rather smitten by it. I think I’ll memorize it and start using it.

I encourage you to do likewise.

And Now, Back to the Ride

Rick borrowed a helmet from Kenny. This helmet was far too small for Rick’s enormous melon, and perched comically atop his noggin. On the plus side, it did make Rick seem much taller.

For shoes, Rick was out of luck. He wore his street shoes, and did not complain about them even once during the ride. Props to Rick.

Grove starts out easy. Deceptively so. You start by riding along wide, gently climbing dirt road, chatting and joking with your riding buddies. This goes on for about a mile.

Then you take a right turn, and everyone stops talking. That’s because suddenly Grove gets brutally steep, and it stays steep for the rest of the ride.

At first, it’s just steep dirt road, which is not too big a deal. Just scoot forward on the seat, drop down a gear, and pedal.

Then it turns left into a steep gully and gets technical. Hoo boy. I feared this moment. I’ve cleaned that chute maybe 10% of the times I’ve tried it, and I am not currently in the best shape of my life.

I cleaned it. No slipping, no problems. Maybe there’s something to this 29" wheel thing.

Kenny shot on ahead, while I — strategically weaving and blocking the trail — kept Rick and Bry from passing.

Shale

After the first set of climbs, we traditionally regroup at a little fire ring. Everyone was really kind, avoiding looking at my gut, not mentioning how Rick was climbing better in his penny loafers than I was in full MTB kit.

Then we started again.

The second half of the climb is even more difficult than the first half. While slightly less steep, it’s absolutely relentless, and it’s almost entirely on loose shale. With serious exposure on the right side. Slip a foot to the right and you’ll be lucky to live. Or unlucky, maybe. Let’s not talk about this anymore, OK? I’m getting queasy.

We got to the bench — someone built a little park bench way up on this treacherous trail as a monument to a lost outdoorsman; best tribute I’ve ever seen — without hitting any snow. That’s about 2000 feet of climbing in about four miles (purely a guess).

Nice.

We couldn’t continue on past the bridge, though; the north side of Grove is always a muddy, snowy mess long after the South side is clean and clear.

Time to descend.

Scared

I developed a couple theories as I rode down this shale-with-death-inducing-exposure:

• Descending skills get rusty when not practiced
• Rick is completely insane. He descended faster — a lot faster — than I did while wearing penny loafers perched on his clipless pedals. Freaky.

I got to the bottom without any problems, though I’m sure I looked ridiculously tentative. I know I sure felt ridiculously tentative.

I still beat Bry to the bottom, though.

Afterward

My legs hurt.

My stomach is huge.

I’m glad to be back.

I’ve always been pretty evenly divided on the road-vs-mountain bike riding issue. When reporters ask me, “Which is better, mountain or road?” I tend to dodge the question with, “Who cares, when they’re both so great?”

Last Friday, though, I think I answered the question definitively, at least for myself.

It was a sunny afternoon. I was unemployed, and uninsured. The lack of insurance pretty much made road biking a non-starter; I knew that while I was more likely to get hurt while mountain biking, I was more likely to get seriously injured or killed while road biking.

So I convinced Bob to skip out early on work; he drove over to my house and then we went mountain biking at Tolt-MacDonald Park in Carnation, WA.

“We’ll probably get lost,” I told Bob. See, this park is a near-infinite tangle of twisty, rolling NorthWest singletrack, deep in the woods. And those mossy-colored trees—well, they all look a lot alike.

“That’s fine,” said Bob, nonchalant. When you have orienteering skills like Bob and I have, you come to accept the occasional befuddled stumbleabout as part of the price of mountain biking.

Log Pile

Something the NorthWest has in abundance that I have not seen elsewhere on mountain bike trails are logpiles. Logpiles feel odd to ride over because about the time your front wheel rolls over the top log and starts going down, your back wheel is just starting to go up the pile. Then your big chainring high-centers on the pile for a moment, and your rear wheel flops high into the air, giving the exact same feeling you get when you’re about to endo.

Then, if you keep your head and keep pedaling—against your instincts, because of course your rear wheel is in the air—your chainring grips the wood and pushes you forward. Your rear wheel bumps to the ground, and then you’ve done it: you’ve ridden over a logpile.

Here I am, just as the chainring bites into the top log. In spite of appearances, please let me assure you that a large tree branch is not protruding from my rump.

Ride The Length of a Log

Riding over a logpile is small potatoes when compared to the move that Bob and I tried probably fifteen times each: Ride up and along the length of a mossy, wet log. I’d guess the distance was about twenty feet.

First, you have to get onto the log, which may be the hardest part of the move. The soft, rotten end of the log makes a decent ramp to the top, but it tapers, forming a notch just before you get to the top that grabs onto your rear tire, slowing you down and throwing you off your line. Here I am, stalled out, my rear wheel deep in the notch.

Once you’re up top, you’ve got to keep rolling, without slipping off. There’s a groove you can ride in, but it’s narrow and if you hit either edge, it’s hard to recover. Here I am, bailing out.

And Bob, using a handy tree to get his balance (after which he had to bail out, because he couldn’t restart).

And me, bailing out, again.

Move Truism Number 1: Take The Long View

After who-knows-how-many tries, I remembered something Stuart Talley (a large hairdresser who also happens to have hundreds of biking-related axioms at his beck and call) taught me about technical mountain biking long, long, ago: don’t look at the obstacles, or you’ll hit them. It occurred that I was staring so hard at the little notch at the top of the approach that I’d never know what to do once I got beyond it.

So the next time I tried riding the log, I looked beyond the notch to the end of the log.

And I cleaned it, including the wheelie-drop at the end.

I admit it: I squealed with delight.

And I regretted that we had stopped taking pictures (in disgust, about fifteen minutes earlier).

Move Truism Number 2: Once Someone Cleans a Move, the Stakes Increase

Up until the moment when I cleaned the log, Bob and I could have ridden away from the move, declaring it unrideable. Once I cleaned it, though, the game changed. Bob—a much more technically adept rider than I—could no longer leave until he had cleaned the log.

He got it on his next try. This is due to a corollary of Truism Number 2: Once you know it can be done, it’s no longer as difficult to do.

Plus, there’s another corollary, which I don’t care for all that much: If fatty rode it, it can’t be all that difficult.

If I Had to Choose

It was after I cleaned the log that it occurred to me: I don’t experience that kind of elation on a road bike. In fact, the kind of enjoyment I get on a road bike is almost completely different from why I like mountain biking. And if I had to choose just one kind of biking, I’d choose mountain biking, because I love that amazing sense of triumph (rare as it is for a schlub like me).

That said, I’m really glad I don’t have to choose between the two. Come to think of it, I can’t imagine why any cyclist would make that choice.