Tag: Dirt Church

Solo post at DaVille today. Hopefully more traction next week.

The THANG:

Two vets and two noobs posted to Dirt Church this morning…but an hour earlier than the usual PAX “winter schedule” which apparently starts at 9… no problem, with an inexperienced DTH and an FNG to boot, an “easier” route was chosen. 

Brief COP #1 in the Parking Lot:

• Welcome & F3 Disclaimer
• Don Quixotes x10 IC (Wilson-speed, as requested by our Whore Daddy Flange)

Mount up and ride to COP #2:

• Warmerama with Gateway 1

Mosey of to COP #3 

• Blueberry Hill – Down & Up
• Total of 5 miles
• Green level Difficulty

Extra time = extra laps on the Gateway, ensuring all obstacles attempted and overcome

BTTF (Parking Lot) for COT:

• Counterama # 4
• Namerama
• Announcerama (see Comments)
• DRAPER took us out in Prayer

NMS:

• YHC volunteered to write up the Backblast to cap off our Corporate Challenge week. Draper admirably led the charge this morning, not only bringing an awesome FNG (Hospital name Chris Buckley), but also popping DTH’s F3-Mtn-Bike cherry. YHC will be back! YHC also thanks Flange for the use of his spare bike (and the carpool to & from – great times catching up bro!), and thanks to DD for lending a helmet. Today’s FNG has been a headlock project of Draper’s for a while now, but the man REALLY enjoyed this morning’s F1/F2 so looks like we’ll be seeing more of him. His nickname is derived from his hobby of building & racing Lemon cars. Thanks again for leading us Draper – great Q bro! 

Two Gearheads and one extra credit seeking novice set off on gravel to explore Pocahontas State Park. Twenty to thirtyish miles was the plan or so YHC was told. Thirty minutes into the ride, Q called for a little sidetrack exploration. Terrain was clear and open, no major obstacles it would seem. Somehow YHC caught a root or was snared by a booby trap, either way a spill was taken. After a few minutes shaking off the cobwebs, YHC realized he had some damaged equipment. No Tools and Pullout graciously guided YHC back to his car and off to Dick’s for replacement gear. YHC trekked a hair over 10 miles, No Tools and Pullout set sail again for a few more. A great-ish time was had. Where’s the Tylenol?

Presumably No Tools and Pullout finished with numberama, nameorama, and COT.

Hurricane Michael did a number on the Gulf Coast,  that’s for sure.  Remnants of the storm came to visit us late in the week but mercifully left quickly.  What looked to be a morning on the fire roads miraculously turned into a singletrack day, mostly dry but with a bunch of trees down.

At 0800,  it was shaping up to be a one man show.  Roper’s still broken.  Pullout was out:  he’s a tree pro, so he was probably doing tree pro things, what with a bunch of trees down, and Profit had to break in a new mower.  None of the other usual suspects replied to the group text, but BT made it for the first time in a long while.   Forty-six degrees at roll-out time… maybe that had something to do with it?

So good to see BT on a mountain bike.  Despite his limited saddle time so far, he’s got a lot of mountain biker in him and way base fitness than YHC, so the pace was conversational plus a little bit, despite there being a bunch of trees down.

The route:   ALL of Sunsetter (one big tree down**) to Bell Return to Gateway 1 (one big tree down) to Gateway 2 (one brushy tree down) to Freight Line, ’cause why not?  Then Blueberry down to Blueberry Return (three huge and some other smaller trees down) to Blue Jay to Corkscrew (one brushy tree down) to the gravel road out.   Thirteen miles and change, with plenty of photo ops.

Where we could,  we busted up the brushy stuff and peeled branches back ’til they snapped out of the way for the next guy.   No reason not to:  it’s not like we were in a hurry, and we were the first dudes on the trails, and you can never have enough trail karma.  Where we couldn’t fix things, we sent pics and locations to the trail bosses (@RVATrailReport), so someone with a chainsaw could get those cleaned up more quickly.

Today’s Tuesday, and they’ll be cutting ’til tonite at least.  Did I mention that there were a bunch of trees down?

 

** When I say “tree down”, I mean “tree down, across the trail, causing us to re-route into the woods”.   Tromp, tromp, tromp.

Yep.  They still ride bikes on Sunday at Dirt Church.  Unfortunately, they do a poor job of backblasting about it… let’s catch up, shall we?

Sunday before last, Pullout and I rode a gravel and road lap in a bit of rain at Gravel Church: Round Four.   No Profit — he was Climbing to Beat Cancer.  Dunno where Jenny Craig was with his badass bike.  It was just the two of us.   It was intimate… close… almost loving.   And we rode bikes, too.  Not going to say much more to say about that.

Last week, Pullout was late to the game (I got a “I forgot my damn shoes!” call at quarter ’til eight) and that wasn’t even the beginning of Dirt Church: the Sunday of Great Mishap Edition.   Our friend John with the Kona couldn’t make it… got a text at 7 saying he was sick.  Haven’t seen him in six weeks due to injury, and we were looking forward to seeing him again.  My Jeep started leaking coolant as I pulled into the parking lot.  My worn out chainwheel ate my brand new chain for most of the ride, so I bailed early, but not before I watched Profit eat it and take a brake lever to the naughty bits on the rock garden on ‘Setter.   An hour later, I got a call from Roper that he hit a tree and maybe he broke a rib?  Poor Roper.  He’s still basking in the afterglow of New Bike Day and now this happens.  Please wish him a speedy recovery.

This Sunday, though, was Old Dude Edition.   Two of Roper’s young (40ish) friends who are fast and fit and well-equipped (bike-wise, I mean) returned from last week to kick the asses of a 50-year-old (YHC), a 55-year-old, a 63-year-old (Profit) and a 65-year-old.   That’s right, readers:  Profit’s not the oldest MTBer we know.  His friend Fred is a hell of a guy and a talented rider. Anthony (a customer of Profit’s and our new friend) rode his new bike well, and he and I had a nice chat about bourbon, mostly.

The route:   Fendley Station to the Hub, Blueberry down, break in the middle for some old school Morgan Green Trail, and back.  Blueberry up, and take the old guys down the Freight Line so they can no longer say they ain’t never done it. (One mile an hour, so no bones were broken.)  Blue Jay Way to Moonshine Run, which was a VERY rad deviation for us, since we usually take BJW to the tail of Corksucker Corkscrew.   We like Moonshine Run.  A lot.  Next Sunday plan on seeing that one in the cue sheet.  It dropped us into the swoopiest part of Sunsetter, and we returned to the Hub via Bell Return and then punched out.

Seventeen miles of smiles, and even the young guys had fun.

Four knuckleheads were undeterred by the forecast, and despite knowing that bands of Florence’s winds and rain may still be part of the equation, sidled out to Pocohantas to ride the only thing available to them: gravel and sand.

Making a long-awaited return appearance, Lab Rat posted just in the knick of time to join the same dudes from last week, and immediately he and Profit started what would be a two-hour mind-meld on the topic of brewing beer.  Despite not being a brewer, YHC is pretty good at beer — mostly the drinking of it — but stuck to chatting with Jenny Craig about bikes, Church, staying out of trouble with the Missus, and general topics.

Same route as last, with a minor deflection for time’s sake:  we had to get Jenny to the Church on time this week. Fendley Station (counterclockwise) to Bright Hope (again, counterclockwise) and through a small stretch of Beach Road back to Fendly and then into the creek for a quick dip.  No harm done, as we were pretty wet by then anyway with the last few miles or so in a solid rain.

All said, the weather really wasn’t much of an issue.   Maybe YHC is a filthy liar, and the ride takes a little longer than advertised, but there was only a small batch of whining and a pretty good batch of peace and quiet through the prettiest parts of the woods, so… balance, mostly.

Still way better than watching the Today Show.

Dirt Church took an alternate form this week:  a lap of the Park’s fire road with the added bonus of the horse trails across Beach Road. This was actually planned last weekend to grant Profit’s b-day wish, since he’d never done a full lap of the gravel. Nope… none of that pesky singletrack to fly down this Sunday! Three of us brought exactly the right gear for the ride.

You don’t know this, but I am and have been for about five years, an avid fan of cyclocross.  I am not fit enough to race standard-format ‘cross (45 minutes on the rivet would kill my old ass), but I do love to watch people “riding ten speeds in the dirt”, so I do my own version when I can.   Fendley Station Trail and the Bright Hope Trail make up most of the Monstercross race track.  I used to ride these every week back before the Swift Creek trails came in 2015 and I’ve even ridden these before work, and in the dark.  Saturday was always for dirt, and Sunday was always for gravel.  But it’s been a while…

Profit’s yellow Kona Jake made a repeat appearance.  Jenny Craig showed up with one of the finest handmade Titanium wide-tired all-road bikes I’ve seen in real life, loaded for bear, and I brought my other bike.  We took the lap counter-clockwise, to postpone the inevitable seventy-foot creek crossing until we were only a mile from the car.

Gravel, dirt, sand, a little rain, peace and quiet, great company, all on nineteen pound drop-bar bikes made for an absolutely brilliant two-hour ride.   We saw cross country boys training, cross country girls training, a pretty horse in a pretty hat, and about four other people all morning.  Hard to beat.

Expect Hurricane Florence to do a number on us and shut down all the other trails, and that means next Sunday’s ride will be much like this one.  I hope.

While most of the congregation was away enjoying the fading last days of summer down at the Rivah, a couple regulars, a newbie, and a test driver started Sunday in the woods.

Profit** brought a couple different bikes and a guy who will end up buying one of ’em.  And even though we’ve seen him a bunch of times, neither Profit nor I recognized E.F. Hutton, who decided to have his first real mountain bike experience with us.    Maybe it was the beard that threw us… maybe the lack of glasses (he wears glasses, doesn’t he?)… either way, there he was, all primed and ready to go.

The day prior, three new trails were unveiled so we figured why not give some of ’em a whirl, and we planned to ride them until we read the sign that said “Most Difficult” with the black diamond and the skull & crossbones, and such, so we noped out of those, but instead decided Sunsetter’s brand new extension would be just fine for us.  And it was.  Sunsetter from the very top should be on everyone’s list.  They added not quite a mile to it, all as flowy as the rest, with just a few rock garden’ish things to contend with.  From there we did the usual route: Bell Return, Blueberry Hill, and just to leave with smiles on our faces, Blue Jay Way back out.

You couldn’t tell that Hutton had never ridden his bike in the woods.  No slouch at all.  Couple more Sundays and he’ll be killing it.

Eleven point seven miles, six hundred feet of climbing, in an hour and a half.

** Sunday was his sixty-friggin’-third birthday.  Even in the wrong shoes, he was pretty much killing it on the 29er.   HBD!

Five riders, from age eleven to sixty-two,  rocked out this morning’s singletrack-heavy Dirt Church ride.

Profit was running a little late but the rest took the gravel warm up to meet him at the top of the trailhead.  In just a few minutes, we figured out that Crikey wasn’t gonna get dropped despite the 140mm cranks, and with all five of us together, it was time to get rad.

Blue Jay Way is a downhill, super-jumpy, twisty trail second only to Corkscrew in technicality and sketchiness at speed, so naturally, we went that way.  Shakedown’s full-rigid Bianchi is about as old as Pullout, but he rocked it like a champ and his 2.0 definitely proved to “have a little rad in him” as advertised in the pre-ride group text.  BJW dumps into the head of Sunsetter and after casually clearing all of that flowy trail, we said our goodbyes to the time-constrained.

Pullout, Profit and YHC scampered up Bell Return at a good clip.  In fact, we rode the whole rest of the ride at a good clip.  My Strava feed says four new PR’s.  After Bell Return, we bombed Blueberry Hill with Pullout picking out the lines.  Blueberry is a flow trail down and up, and in perfect shape (like it was today} can be taken at Mach two without worry.  So we did that.

Once back to the top, Profit rolled to his convenient parking spot.  Pullout and YHC railed Blue Jay for a final quad workout and yep… another PR.  I was pretty much on the rivet for all of it, and this trail is straight up thrilling at speed.  Pretty sure the younger man had something left in the tank afterward, but I was toast.

Can’t wait to ride this again.