Every summer, Frank gets a 10-day break between the end of summer classes and the beginning of fall classes. Despite the fact that his break between spring and summer classes is a much longer nearly two-month period, the August break seems to be turning into our traditional vacation time. This tradition started with our wedding taking place immediately after the end of spring classes two years ago and our honeymoon being delayed until August due to a combination of wedding fatigue and W101 prep. It just seems to make sense because May and June are such prime riding time in Rothrock, and the race season is still so young and full of promise that I don't want to be distracted. By August, burnout is usually well on its way in, and it feels kind of refreshing to go ride bikes somewhere novel without the pressure of competition.
Our first stop was Windham, and I spent pretty much the whole time trying to figure out how to get the bike set up semi-comfortably. I finally got the brakes where I wanted them, and after a lot of trial and error, learned that just because you can slam your DH saddle as low as it will go does not mean you should. The geometry made it such that at the lowest seat height, the saddle was actually in my way super badly and was banging on the inside of my knees the whole time. I ended up putting it somewhere similar to where it would be with my dropper post down on my Stumpjumper. The bike still didn't feel as awesome as I had imagined it would, but at least I stopped feeling like I was going to crash and die.
Windham only had five main trails with a few additional options near the bottom. They included a very long, super-dy duper smooth, easy green trail, a slightly harder blue trail, the "longest blue jump line on the East Coast", a "Citizen's Downhill", and the UCI World Cup downhill course from a couple of years ago. The first two were borderline awful on a big bike that I was still dialing in, but I enjoyed the 3.5 mile jump trail well enough, despite being pretty tired by the end. The Citizen's Downhill was a lot of fun, and I finally had a decent run on it the last lap once the bike and I had come to some sort of understanding. The UCI downhill was, um, an experience. An experience of mostly walking.
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| Killington K-1 Gondola - Day 2 |
Our second day of riding was in Killington, we took a couple of laps on the short, easy trails off of the Snowshed lift, and then moved on the longer runs from the Ramshead lift. We only did the blues off of Ramshed, and there wasn't anything up there that I was super in love with. We took one trip up the Gondola to the biggest runs, and took the one continuous single black down. It turns out that it was the only trail open from that lift, so we didn't go up again. We actually spent a lot of time going over and over Step It Up/Stinky, which was a fun little run from the Snowshed lift with a good selection of little table tops, a couple of different sizes of drops, and a tiny, adorable boner log. I'm not sure how many times we did it, but I got a little more comfortable and got a little more air each time.
I was still avoiding the biggest drop and the boner log by the last run, because I still wasn't 100% comfortable with the bike. However, when we stopped so that I could take a video of Frank on the boner log, and some old guys on DH bikes came along after us, totally flopped it, and survived, so I decided to go back and give it a try. As you can see from the video above, it's not a great effort, as my go can also be described as "totally flopped it and survived", but it was a nice step in conquering my fear of all wooden things that pitch upward.
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| Okemo Small Lift - Day 3 |
Our third stop was Evolution Bike Park Okemo in Vermont. We hadn't really heard anything about it besides that it was on our MTB Park Pass list. It was a pretty small place, but it has decent room for expansion since they already had two lifts running. The lower one is pretty short and goes to a network of mostly green trails. There was one fun little blue trail with some decent baby jumps that we rode a lot. The place definitely seemed aimed at families and first-timers in its difficulty level.
The upper lift was very long and had one blue trail and one black. The blue trail was long, not technical at all, and required a decent amount of pedaling. I wouldn't have minded trying to go really fast on it on my Stumpy, but it was not fun on my DH bike. We rode the black run twice, the first time stopping a lot to check out the "double black" alternative lines, and then another time through at semi-race pace. The middle video shows me conquering one of the serious double black features, although they did admittedly get somewhat harder as we progressed down the mountain.
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| Rainy Highland Lift - Day 4 |
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| Cat-themed trail names at Highland |
We had planned on hitting Mount Snow for our fourth day, but the trail map didn't have us that excited. We were staying at an AirBnB just across the state line of New Hampshire, and Instagram commenters urged us to go to Highland instead. Highland was not on the MTB Park Pass, but a forecast of thunderstorms at Mount Snow convinced us it was worth actually paying for passes to see what the big fuss was about.
While not as bad as thunderstorms, we still had slow, drizzy rain the entire day at Highland, which made me afraid of the many, many wooden features there. I'm sure the rain didn't help, but I wasn't feeling all the love that people seem to gush for Highland. We mostly ended up riding Cat's Paw, which admittedly was a fun little blue trail, but since I was avoiding the wood features, it wasn't that interesting. We hoped that the single-black technical trails would be up our alley, right on the edge of, "it's scary but I rode it". They might have been in nice weather, but in the rain they were a little too scary and frustrating.
On a fun side note, after we left Highland, Frank found a craft brewery only four miles away that he wanted to visit. What we didn't know was that Google Map's "four miles" were scary, rutted, semi-flooded back roads not meant to be traversed by a Mazda 5. It was pretty nerve-racking, and at one point Frank got out to measure the depth of the mud puddles before driving through to make sure we wouldn't get stuck. When we finally reached the end of the road, we found out that it was appropriately named "Misery Rd." Luckily, we made it, and the beer was really good, so it was worth it, I guess.
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| Thunder Mountain Lift - Day 5 |
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| 2019 Hail Advanced 1 |
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| 2019 Intrigue Advanced 1 |
Our final day was at Thunder Mountain where we were treated to another full day of rain. We had planned on going there that day, anyway, but Frank found out that there would be a Giant/Liv demo day there and signed us up.
I got to ride a Hail Advanced 1, which has a 170mm fork this year, and the newly released Intrigue Advanced 1. You know, the bike that
I desperately wanted two years ago when it didn't exist yet. The demo bikes were fine, but the only Hail they had by the time I got to the front of the line was a size too big for me with the stock 800mm bars, which made things pretty awkward. It did remind me of the things I liked about my old Hail and was obviously lighter because it was carbon fiber, but it was also clear why I moved on to something snappier for my full-time race bike. The Intrigue was a fun little bike, but by the time I rode it, I was getting a feel for the awesome East Coast gnar of Thunder Mountain, and I really just wanted to be back on my Stumpy ripping it up with confidence on a bike that was set up to my small-handed tastes. I had been sticking to the DH bike every day up until that point while trying to learn to like it, but since Thunder Mountain was full of the kind of trails that I like to ride, and I wanted to ride them on the bike with which I felt the most comfortabl. So after we returned the demo bikes, the real fun began.
Thunder Mountain is officially my new favorite bike park. They have three blue trails that offer a decent amount of technical fun, a couple of top-to-bottom technical single-blacks, and an assortment of fun little single-black cut-throughs between the blue trails for variety. On a dry day, their black trails would have been perfectly in our fun zone, lots of oddly-shaped slabs of rocks with roots mixed in, just a little different and more technically difficult than anything in Rothrock. However, there was still a lot that we were intimidated by in the rain, and there are still two double-black trails that we didn't even check out due to the conditions. Now I really want to go back in better weather and be able to ride more.
The irony is that after visiting some much more jump-focused parks in the previous days, it was nestled between beautiful ribbons of East Coast gnar at Thunder Mountain where jumping finally clicked for me. They only have two jump trails, one blue and one double black, and those only run on the lower half of the mountain. We ended up riding The Gronk, which is the blue jump trail, three times. The first was unimpressive as I rode with the same level of caution that I always do on a new jump trail, but I noted that it was well-built and not overly long. There were also good rest periods between sets of jumps to recollect yourself.
We did another run a couple of laps later, and I started hitting the jumps with more speed, which is something I'm usually afraid to do. I'd tried going into some tabletops with more speed at Highland the day before, and the bike kept whipping up in front of me as I clung on in the back seat, so I was working on preventing that from happening. The second time on The Gronk felt good and was at least close to being my best jump run of the trip so far.
For our final run, we intended to take one of the black cut-throughs to Harold's Blend, the most technical blue trail, which we'd enjoyed a lot, but we ended up at the hub where the jump trails began instead of Harold's. Despite having said, "Maybe jumping just isn't my thing, and that's okay," like two laps before, I figured it was the universe telling me that we needed to go down The Gronk one more time. Then somewhere between the hub and bottom of the mountain, I learned to jump for real instead of the fake jumping that I'd been engaging in all summer. Something just clicked and I found the correct body position to allow the bike to whip up the lip at full speed and still end up tall and pulling up at the lip. I think I audibly giggled when that happened, and I continued down the mountain catching enough air that it scared me a little every time, but I continued to land safety. It was sort of magical.
On a side note, when we returned, Frank attempted to put softer springs in the DH bike for me, and found that the previously owner had somehow shoved the wrong size spring into the rear. I'm going to guess that's a big contributing factor to why it felt so terrible riding it over any rough stuff, and felt more chattery than my Stumpjumper, despite having significantly more travel. So hopefully next time I ride it, it will feel better, because by the end of Day 4 I was really beginning to wonder why anyone would want to ride a DH bike.
That will be at least a week before I ride it again, though, because we're already packing our bags again to head down to Frederick, MD for the first-ever Sheduro. Having heard so many good things about the Frederick Watershed, I'm very excited to race there, even if my body's still more in vacation mode than race mode.
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