Ass: kicked

Just got back from a bunny ride on the Sun Circle and Black Rock loops out at the Sweetwater Trails. Most of the terrain looks like this, and I was able to motor right along.

Other sections are a bit more bony, and I was dabbing all over the place. I spent about half of my saddle time struggling to get a flow going; it's embarrassing to get one's ass handed to oneself by oneself on a solo ride. I checked my records when I got home and was astonished to see that, without realizing it, I'd gone almost a year and a half without riding there. This has happened before, and it was just as frustrating then. I eventually got it together and was able to clean a few problem sections before the setting sun chased me back to the pickup.

 

And I do have a need to get better at this whole singlespeeding thing because there's an event on the horizon at which sucking ass on a bike will be, well, let's just say it'll be subject to much derision.

Not the way I remember it

Yesterday, I thrift-scored a DVD called Changing Gears - Flagstaff and the Mountain Bike. I'd heard about it a while back, but never really pursued getting a copy. Factory sealed and 99 cents; it was a ganga.

BeanSS and I sat through it, waiting for it to get interesting. Apparently, a bunch of pioneering folks drank some beer and/or smoked some weed before racing down the unpaved Snowbowl road in 1982. Then, nothing really happened until the Schultz Fire in 2010 or so, around which time some Flagstaff-based professional racers and LBS owners sat for interviews.

I arrived at NAU in 1988 with a beater one-speed I'd assembled around a salvaged coaster-brake frame with an orange rattle-can paint job - the perfect gettin' around kind of bike. I didn't want or need anything fancy, and actually felt a little smug about how I'd pulled together a serviceable bike for about 15 bucks. Then I started seeing the mountain bikes all over campus and in town. OK, yeah, I wanted one of those things.

Soon enough, I bought a used Raleigh Mountain Tour Tamarack from Loose Spoke. They were planning to fix it up and flip it, but I talked them into letting me buy it as-is. Interesting side note - the bike had 650b wheels.

That first bike started me down the path to being an at-times rabid mountain biker. I rode all through college, with roommates, neighbors, friends, and friends of friends. I did a small race near the Payson Rodeo Grounds and another on the Tonto National Forest where the Sharp Creek Campground is today. I graduated in 1992 and moved to Page to work for the NPS at Lake Powell. I road tripped back down to Flagstaff with my bike whenever I could. A couple of years later, married and living in Phoenix, I'd go back up to Flag with BeanSS whenever time and our budget permitted. We highlighted every trail we rode in our early edition of Cosmic Ray's Fat Tire Tales and Trails.

The sport was blowing up as well, even in the Valley. The Cactus Cup was a full-on pro event. BeanSS and I raced a few of the MBAA races (she made the podium each time), and even these local events hosted the occasional factory team box truck.

The Arizona mountain biking scene ended for us in 1998, when we moved to Sacramento for my work. We still rode plenty, eventually getting into singlespeeds and spectating at the 2002 NorCal SSWC. The riding continued through our move to Tucson and, in fact, I interrupted this blog to get in a sunset ride with BeanSS. Nevertheless, there was a whole decade where my (and then, our) world revolved more or less around mountain biking in and around Flagstaff.

So, what does this have to do with the DVD? I guess what was missing was a really good look at the riding. There were a number of still photos from back in the day and some recent footage of people riding what looked like Schultz Creek and Little Elden or maybe Fatman, but it was just way too much talking about how things were in the early 1980s or how great it is now. The history of a couple of the local bike shops was interesting, but they were ultimately just points of departure for trail rides. I never felt transported back to the place I knew, and I didn't get any insight into the place it is now. A sizeable number of new trails have been built in the many years since I left, and I've never been able to get away long enough to ride them, despite having been back in Arizona since 2003.

Anyway, I can't really complain because the DVD was practically free, and it's not like I could have come up with anything myself. I just think it missed the mark and didn't capture what a mountain biking paradise Flagstaff actually is.