Life is easy

I sometimes feel embarassed or a little guilty about how easy my life is right now. Work is very slow and there is a lot of time for riding.

Saturday was the warmest day of the year so far. K really wanted to have one last ski for the year and we went to the Elfin Lakes hut. It's about a 24 km round trip in Garabaldi Provencial Park. There can be good skiing, but temps were at or just above freezing all night and you could almost see puddles in the skin track. We didn't even bother to yo-yo any slopes. The trail is very popular with snowshoes and novice skiers as you can get to the hut without crossing any real avalanche terrain and there are bright orange trail markers every 5 -10 meters for the low visibility days. The high traffic load has beat down the last 4-5 kms into a luge track. Kind of fun.

View back to Howe Sound
Mt. Garabaldi (it's a volcano. Part of the same chain as Baker and Rainer and Meager)
We got back to the car and joined another friend for a short XC ride on some of the lower Squamish trails. The BCBR training guide said Saturday should have been 3-5 hour road ride. We only rode for about 2 hours, but I have admit that my legs were 'a bit fatigued' and I wasn't too sad to have a short ride. Anyway, the shorter ride meant a shorter time to beer!

Howe Sound Brew Pub in Squamish has their spring Rasberry Wheat beer on tap for the season. Sunday dawned nicer than expected. I was lying in bed trying to decide whether to ride road or dirt. It's like trying to decide between having the chocolate croissant or the cinnamon bun. Tortuous decision.

Sent my buddy M a text asking if he was headed to Seymour for some mountain biking. He had ridden on Saturday and his wife won't let him ride both days on the weekend until he finishes building their kayaks. M gave me some suggestions on which trails to ride that are within my skill level. But, it was sunny out and I have a new road bike.... so I put in a quick 75 km ride (quick relatively speaking as I couldn't hang onto the back wheel of the guy on the Cervelo near Point Grey) and then changed clothes, changed bikes and attempted to exchange the mountain bike spds for platform pedals. Since I would be riding alone and on new-to-me trails it seemed prudent to have platforms. But I couldn't get the right foot pedal off. Why isn't there a rent-a-man service??

The ride on Seymour was very nice. Went up Old Bucks, a wide non-technical climb. Traversed along the Baden Powell trail to the top of Severed Dick where the downhill starts. On went the leg and arm armor, down went the saddle and I set the pedal tension very very low. It was a fun trail, pretty old school riding with just a few man-mades for trail protection. There are a series of 6-7 bigger drops on the bottom 1/3 of the trail that I walked though I'm sure most north shore folks not only ride the drops, but huck them.

In all, it was the best of all possible worlds this weekend! I was tired and hungry and happy by Sunday night.