Vacation Ride Reports

While on vacation we were able to get in some great rides.  The tick list included Teton Pass area where we rode Black Canyon...then we moved on towards Jackson where we rode around the Cache Creek area and then our last day of riding in the area was at Shadow Mtn.

Each of the rides had very particular characteristics that made them sufficiently different from each other which made it really fun...

onto the rides...

Targhee:

Erin took advantage of the Pierre's Hole race flagging on the course in order to ride the fun part of the course the next day on Sunday.  She rode the upper singletrack loop that meandered through Aspens and had great views of the west side of the Tetons.  She then linked that up to the downhill of Mill Creek and enjoyed around 1,800 ft of descent!  It actually worked out pretty well that the course flagging was still up as it was an easy way to cruise the course and not worry about being on the correct trails..

Black Canyon Ride Report:

Profile...around 17 miles with about 3,500 ft of elevation gain

We got a detailed topo map from a store in Driggs and used that as our baseline and planning for the week as it had a suggested ride list as well as camping listings.  As it turns out the map was a little out-dated and we would find that out the hard way in the Teton Pass area.  One of the suggested rides listed had a trail description starting from a certain point...the problem was that it showed the start area in a different area...so the ride description and the visual did not synch up.  It took me about 45 minutes to get oriented until I found the right access to get to the top of Black Canyon.  It took some re-tracing of around 500 ft of climbing that we warmed up on and then diverted into a section of the Arrow trail that essentially paralleled the dirt road I climbed up on...I even looked at the trail map they had listed and tried to connect between my older map and what they had listed at the trial-head.  As it turns out one of the trails listed was now closed to mountain bikes and open to horses only.  The nice thing was that they also had trails that were mountain bike only trails in order to avoid user conflicts.

The legs felt OK considering the recent carnage from Pierre's a couple of days preceding.

Once back on track, The climb up took us through the old Hwy (closed to motorized vehicles) and then linked into singletrack for the last 1,000 ft of climbing.  Once cresting at around 9,000 ft, there were some great views the were about 180 view of the east side of the Tetons...  The area must have had a ton of moisture because the wildflowers were as tall as I was in some areas and the trail was overflowing with wildflowers such that they would hit me as I went by.

The riding was a lot of fun and I found myself stopping frequently to take pictures of the great views.  The singletrack quickly lost elevation but you still felt like you got a ton of great riding in as the 2,500+ ft descent gave you ample time to enjoy the descending and take in the views.  You had to stay on alert as there were a couple of sections that came out of nowhere and surprised you with drop offs and rutted areas that would knock you off your bike if you were not paying attention (which was easy to do given the views).  

The wildflowers had passed their peak bloom but you could just how big they got this year.  There were a couple of times when the plants hit my upper body hard enough to make me wince a little.  There were points where the trail was so overgrown that you could not see more than about 10 ft in front of you.  It made the descent pretty exciting...

Once you finished the descent, it was time to grind up the old Hwy back up to where the car was...on the way, there was a nice little pond if you wanted to take a breather...no time for me though...kept moving along on the steepness of a hill in the mid-day heat....needed to get back so the wifer could go on her ride and I could look after the pups....at this point the dogs still had a fair amount of energy but they too were starting to dig into their reserves.

In order to minimize the climbing for the wifer, I planned on meeting her at the bottom of the Black Canyon descent so that she would not have to grind the last several hundred feet of climbing back to the car.  As I was going downhill from the Pass I saw the following:

This was a runaway ramp for downhill truckers who lost their brakes and needed to bail...I have seen these in many states, but what threw me a curveball was that the ramp is on the opposite side of the road so the runaway truck would theoretically have to cross oncoming uphill traffic in order to hit the ramp....mannnn ohhhhhh mannnn, I would not want to be that uphill traffic if I saw that runaway truck going the opposite direction.  The topper was that there was not one, but two of these opposite side ramps going downhill...Crikey!

As the wifer got back to the truck and we were loading up the truck, we met this interesting cat (no pun intended)...he must have been socially starved because he talked our ear off.  One of the more notable things about him was that he kept telling us of how he had domesticated a mountain lion...interesting feller for sure!  He started off the conversation by asking to borrow my cell phone to call someone (after he had just popped open a Coors light tall boy)...fortunately he could not remember the # so it was a moot point but it started off as awkward from the start.

It was one of those weird conversations where both the wifer and I were looking for a polite way to excuse ourselves from the conversation but we never had a moment to interject an excuse to bail.  After about 15 minutes of being conversation-napped, the wifer was able to say that she was hungry and we needed to go find food.  By the time we excused ourselves we had learned way too much about him...

Since this is turning into an epic entry, I will shut it down and include the Cache Creek area ride report and Shadow Mtn ride on the next update....time to get back to work!