Clarity

I piloted my Kierkegaardian ship into an iceberg last week and many people drowned. The chorus of voices in my head is now a little quieter since the herd has been thinned: the crash had this effect.. the weak couldn't make it and therefore died off. I got dark night of Soul-ed. Ironically, I didn't see it coming. guess ya never do, guess it would defeat the purpose if you did.

Anyhow, here is a video of the Ridge Trail from last week.

Ride Report: Feb. 13

Blogger sent out an email, and I was probably the only recipient. They said that 99.99% of all Blogger users host their posts on Google's servers. The rest of us (the .01%) FTP kilobytes to our own private web servers or webspace. This math is unacceptable to the Google so they are discontinuing FTP capabilities for Blogger at some indeterminate point in the future... I probably shouldn't have deleted the email. Oh well. This just means that we'll lose the Blogger interface and have to find another solution, or just go back to playing with HTML.

Anyways, the early spring continues, things are blooming and the temps haven't left the 50s for weeks... amazing really. I took a ride Saturday and while it was rainy, muddy and slow I filmed a few trails anyway:

Ride Report: Jan 23

The past week was warm behind the norm; temps sat in the mid-upper 50s and it didn't rain. My ride desire was off the charts, so I did night rides Monday, Wed, and Friday... the Wednesday ride was crazy, I rode to the top of the mountain, to Whoopsie Woodle and then all the way back down to the top of Ridge. The view from the top, of the mountains basked in moon light was just epic and it made me think that if I could write profound things then this view would give me the appropriate inspiration.

Saturday, today, was mission was to head up to 'Natural Selection', the trail Nate helped me finish once he moved to Bellingham and 'cam' it. The cam turned out pretty good considering the somewhat beaten state of the trail. I filmed a little tour before the ride, so I'll let the shaky camera work speak for itself:



Also, the helmet cam of Natural Selection with pieces of some other trails too:

Ride Report Jan. 16

Friday night I rode. It was a half-good decision, half-bad decision. The entire previous week it had rained, and needless to say the mountain was in a muddy state. During the day this just means you go slower, but at night it means you can't see the trail AND you go slower. it was good though, all in all, I rode Ridge Trail, up to Polo, over to Intestine and back down to Ridge. A solid XC-night ride.

Saturday I rode again. My efforts to go fast were severely hampered by sore legs, soft trails, and a bad case of swamp-ass (not the taco bell kind, the type where you carry 29 pounds of mud on your butt) nevertheless I pushed onward and had a good time. I was able to helmet cam SST, bonanza and the bottom of ridge. I won't say the videos are anything special, given the conditions (and the aformentioned swamp-ass), but I offer them to you dear reader, as a visual meditation of the best kind, the bike kind.

Ride Report: Jan. 3, 2010

I had an argument with myself today. The topic of dispute was whether to start writing more about riding, or not. The debate was heated, with both sides presenting strong point, counter-attacks, but in the end I came out victorious. This is why I like arguing with myself, I always win.

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6 months, its amazing how quickly it passes by. In an instant you can flash from the sweltering days of an unbearable summer to the cool rain and mist of winter. These thoughts floated whimsically through my head as I ventured out to the trail, the project of 2009. Nate and I had a dream plan to create the ultimate DH link-up from mid-Galbraith down to the bottom of the hill. For reasons unspoken, work stopped on this trail a while back, as it too often does on this kind of dream project. Things get in the way you see, life beats you down, or lifts you up. Jobs, family, what have you... they all conspire to keep the trail in a state of limbo, in that lingering where it is unclear if the builders will finish the job or the forest will swallow up the hours and erase all traces of the work and sweat invested into the dirt.

This was the state I found the trail in today. All the leaves are down now, carpeting the trail in a thick interlaced weave. It would take a lot of rake work to move this lot, I thought to myself. As Nate and I had speculated, the stream bed which had remained dry all summer has since been replaced by a small babbling brook, whose musings are now audible throughout the entire trail, offering their opinions on the consistency of dirt, and the true direction of trail flow, I'm sure.

Melancholy is probably the feeling that would best describe what I think every time I come back to one of my neglected trails. The state of disrepair speaks to my absenteeism.