For Saturday 10/2, Crabtree and I had decided to try out the Portuguese Bend trail in RPV again (mostly to make up for the initial failed attempt using my brother's Costco Schwinn special). We hit the road and arrived at the trail head around 8:30 AM. This time we are sporting bike bells to alert people of our presence without having to yell "on your left" a million times.
The weather started off damp, cool and just a tad foggy (nice riding weather if you ask me). We head down the first descent of roughly one half mile then make a pit stop (omg had to peeeeeeeeeee). From here we had to make our first decision. Continue on the trail we did last time, or check out the full fledged geoladders trail. Acting out of bravery and adventure, we opt for the latter. This turned out to be a bad mistake.
The first climb was tough. Either side of the trail had some decently hard packed dirt littered with stones, while the center of the trail was a river of fairly large rocks (5" in diameter +). I also missed the pedal while trying to clip in and took some skin off my shin. Once we finished the climb and caught our breath, we noticed the trail had signs prohibiting bicycles on all horse trails. Damn it.... Not wanting to get ticketed, we flipped a bitch and headed back the way we came. Crabtree and his sexy new EX5 full suspension bike ate up the trail. I didn't fare so well with my 29er hardtail (with a seemingly rigid fork).
At this point I may as well clue you in to the fact that I recently upgraded my brakes to hydraulic and went from 160mm rotors to 203mm. This proved to be far too much braking power... Coming down the rocky hill my front tire hit a deeply embedded stone which in turn caused me to pull on my front brake just a bit too much and over the bars I went! The fall itself wasn't bad since I didn't hit any major rocks or spiny plants. My bike however was very angry at me.
I coast down the rest of the hill to catch up with Crabtree and tell him my bike is having problems. My initial diagnosis was I had bent the rear derailleur, since the symptoms including the derailleur swingarm brushing against the spokes. At this very moment, some downhill cyclists were pushing their bikes uphill (natch). They stop and inspect it, saying that the hanger was bent, not the derailleur. That was much better news, since the part is much cheaper to replace. We discussed bike mechanics for a bit and they confirmed the 203mm rotors were a bit too much for an all-mountain/cross country bike. I would be better suited with a 185mm/160mm setup. They took off and we tried to bend the hanger back into place, with a bit of luck. I could continue on so long as I didn't use gears 1 and 2. Great....no granny gear for the climb.
Not wanting to end the trip after only 30 minutes, we braved on. The downhill segment continued on for about a mile and we took a quick pitstop to eat. We had two choices of trails from this point (which in fact was the place we turned around on the previous ride). There was a wide uphill road to the left, and a small technical-looking singletrack to the right. We choose the former.
I tell you what....climbing in 3rd gear instead of 1st or 2nd suddenly made it transform from an aerobic activity to an anaerobic one. My quads were burning like fire, but I trudged on. At the top of this hill we stopped and took a few pics. one two three
From here we just wandered and didn't find any trails that looped back to our starting point, so we just went back the way we came. Initially it was a breeze because we were heading back downhill, but then the real climb began. I changed up my power delivery and it saved my legs quite a bit, so losing the first two gears didn't feel as bad anymore. Crabtree kept yelling "RRRAAAAA Crab not built for this!" at the mountain. A few older guys passed by us when we were stopped under a tree (it had gotten hot by this point and I was regretting my black motocross jersey). Some hikers called to us as we were climbing "Hey those old guys are beating you!" I responded "Ah, we're letting them win!"
After about two miles of bitching and uphill climbing we finally made it back to the truck. Total elapsed time was roughly 3 hours.
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