The weekend kicked off with an easy road ride on Friday night, followed by a ride at Pine Log on Saturday afternoon. It was SO NICE stepping out of the car and actually having to REMOVE layers! We had a great ride, climbing to the towers and then descending via the usual Hanging Mountain route. We tried sawing the log out of one of the better rock gardens, but were limited by the size of the saw and waning daylight...we were SO CLOSE! Stubborn Tree! We're going to head up there in the near future and just walk that 6-7 mile section with some bigger tools and a chainsaw to clean it up a bit. The pinetree descent that we already cleared was again a zillion times better. Even Chris had fun and I think he likes that I'm faster on the scary looking stuff. I think he also likes that I now have an excuse to go slower on the climbs, but you'd never know it since he was off-the-front for most of the ride...both up and down. We followed the ride with about 10 lbs of Mexican food, which my stomach clearly did not have room for...
Sunday was another visit to Fort Mountain to get in some good 'ol suffering on the East West Loop. After four days of riding I'm surprised my legs were even functional, and amazingly I cleaned all but a 2 foot section on every straight up and rocky pitch in that place (minus those 6 or so tight switchbacks of course...) Highlight of the day was barreling down a downhill and seeing a family of black bears on the road right in front of me. It was a momma and two cubs, so we gave them a few minutes to move on before continuing. Of course that section of the trail seemed to switchback in the same area for over a mile, so I was constantly looking around for big black things moving in the woods...we definitely didn't want to spook them and make the mother feel threatened. Yeah, its quite a challenge to roll down a typical Ft. Mtn downhill when scanning the woods for bears....thankfully we didn't see anymore wildlife on our ride and made it back to the car in good spirits. Despite its toughness, I really like the East West Loop. Its like a Pine Log that actually gets ridden once in a while and cleared out occasionally.
Right now I'm soaking up my Vitamin D on the back deck, nursing a glass of sweet tea hoping that my hubby makes it home from the O-meet though all the drunken NASCAR race traffic. Ahhh...life is good...and Miss Banshee thinks so too!
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