Up & Down

I went for a mountain bike ride yesterday. This time it was something a little different. A friend of mine and I drove to Big Bear Lake. We decided to visit Snow Summit, a Ski Resort located in the area.

Snow Summit closes doors for skiing when the snow melts, and then switches over to providing trails for mountain bike riding during the summer. They add a bike rack on to every other chair in the chair lift. This way your bikes ride up in one chair and you sit in the next one.

It's an interesting way to ride your bike, you takes a ski lift up to the top of the mountain, and then you ride down.

A normal bike ride for me is around 20 miles with almost 2, 000 feet of elevation gain. I'm pretty tired after something like that. yesterday I rode 35 miles and client over 9000 feet in elevation. Of course it was a little misleading since all of the climbing was on a chairlift.

The best trails are steep and have lots of jumps. Some of the jumps were really big. The best line of jumps was called party wave. It had over a dozen tabletop jumps you can hit while riding down the hill. Lots of burms and other obstacles to ride on. It was considered a black diamond run. While I don't have a lot of experience jumping mountain bikes, I've been jumping BMX bikes for years so that background definitely paid off. I could see how people who come to mountain biking through riding road bikes can get themselves in troubleriding quickly.

Want to get an idea about what it looks like? See below for a video of someone else doing the same jumps I did yesterday. I was going a little slower than him but not by much. I was able to clear almost all of the jumps you see in the video. Click here to watch.

The top of the mountain had signage telling people about different jump runs you could go on. I loved how they included notes about changes they've made to jumps. Notice how the sign below says one of the jumps has been shortened by two feet. Two feet makes a big difference when you're flying in the air. The place is totally set up for dirt jumpers.

 It was very fast and I almost never had the pedal. As a matter of fact I would get on the chairlift, ride to the top of the mountain, and then ride down the mountain and roll over to the chairlift again. I never had to change gears at all. It was a lot of fun!

On the way back we drove through the Inland Empire. It was over a hundred and eight degrees at 6 pm. Very hot!

I had a wonderful time and plan to do it again!