Over New Year’s we spent some time in St. George climbing and mountain biking. Carly bought a mtb from a friend in Oct. last year and hadn’t ridden too much. But over the New Year’s break I borrowed a bike from Jeremy who wasn’t using it because of a wrist injury. Turns out biking is pretty fun. While the record of my past mountain biking and bike trials adventures are somewhat lost to updating technology, I was heavily into the bike trials scene in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. When I came to rock climbing I stopped biking and haven’t ridden in basically 20 years. Turns out some amazing things have happened in those 20 years. Bike technology is phenomenal. 29″ wheels, dropper posts, single front chainrings, carbon fiber, full suspension, a whole host of great stuff has happened and made mountain biking super fun again.
So late this spring I purchased a bike of my own and it has been fantastic. I don’t think I’ll drop trail running, climbing, motorcycling or skiing, but adding in mtbing certainly is a fun new (again) thing for us.
We spent a weekend in Maple Canyon climbing and then on the way home to SLC we stopped on the Nebo Loop road to ride around 8000′ out of the heat. The trail we picked was quite adventury and not like the buffed, groomed, and engineer flow trails I had ridden a bit with the new ride. This was more old school cross country with log crossings and even some sections of wildly bumpy dried mud from where cattle had used the trail when wet. Still a fun time and I’ve had a bunch of fun rides since and no doubt more to come.