Sunday, March 2, 2008

It was a beauty weekend

So Lance [Canfield], Steve [Niner] and I were jonesing to find a decent place to ride while we were over here in Taiwan and after a lot of hard searching we finally found a killer trail that was pretty buff with good flow and lots of airs. Its called the speedtrap and is in the mountains of Beitou.

It was a beautiful day and lots of locals were out taking pics of the cherry blossoms on our shuttle route so sometimes it was a slow go. It also took us about 4 hours of driving and lots of walking random trails and looking for signs of mountain bike tracks to figure out if we were even in the right area. We knew however that all the work we put in now would pay off later when we had the urge to rip again.

I brought along my trusty Scirocco with the Nixon up front and figured the trail wasn't treacherous enough that I needed anything bigger. Without suspension your legs get a better workout on those bumpy sections and a mild trail can become a little more difficult which makes it a lot more fun.
Lance has his Formula which he likes to run over here and it did look like a fun bike; Steve took the Scream because we had planned on shuttling and it would have been definitely a plusher ride then his XC rig he has here.

You can see its pretty lush in the trees and it was both similar and different to the riding I do back home. The trees had a nice canopy but definitely look different then the cedars and pines of the North Shore that I am accustomed to. The trail had some sweet flow to it and even though the red dirt was fun to ride on, I did have to let some air out of the tires because the side lugs wouldn't hook up for any kind of railing; which I learned lying on my side after the front washed out.

We started riding at about 3pm and managed to get in 6 shuttles before it got too dark at 5:30pm.

All in all it was an awesome day, with some good riding in a place I've never ridden before and even though the trail was not near as knarly as some of the stuff back home it was a ton of fun and with good company -Lance and Steve - who are both good and fast, it was that much more enjoyable.

We'll probably see if we can get permission to go up there and repair/clean a few sections that need it. I however don't want to do that unless the local builders give us the green light. It could use some TLC however and we don't mind chipping in while we're here.

In the 2 pics of Lance in the orange shirt can you guess what is strange about him in the picture?