Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Rare Air & Fat Tires

If last weekend wasn't enough sun and exercise, this weekend Diego, Vincent, Linda - other (relatively) new hires - and I climbed a couple of 14ers on Saturday, and then I turned up at Winter Park for a day full of riding on Sunday.
Winter Park is a ski resort by winter and a moutain bike / hiking resort during the summer. The park converts one of the chairlifts into a mountian bike & rider lift which shuttles you from the car park to 10700ft in 11 minutes.
It's fantastic. Absolutely Fantastic. The best rolling singletrack and sustained, fast technical descents I've ever ridden. The most beautiful setting: Pine corridors opening out into Rocky Mtn valleys.
The first run took me over two hours - thanks largely to a little over-ambition and not fully considering the name of the trail I was riding: Top Roof of the Rockies... I did get to climb up another 500ft or so and it did make the downhill last a lot longer...
The subsequent trips were quicker but it still took between 45mins - 1.5 hours to ride down the mountain. It was glorious. Rather than type you to jealousy, here's some links:

Updated photos - New photos are at the back, so just skip to them if you don't like re-runs.
Winter Park - check out the section on Mountain Biking
Web Cam's from Winter Park - not the most informative, but cool nonetheless.
Trail Guide (small/large)

Look for the the Zephyr Express: Taking that to the top, my favourite descent was CHEYENNE (Blue) till the FREERIDE SKILLS PARK where I picked up THE DOWNHILL (Black) - riding it all the way till it hit LONG TRAIL (Blue) and following that down to the FREERIDE SKILLS PARK which was a medium level terrain park. Soooo much fun.

I'm trying to figure out how to post videos to the blog. Stay tuned.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

How high up is heaven?
Amazing views; the bike doesn't look too bad either!
love, mum

Joanne said...

I MISS YOU MATTHEW!!! xoxxox j