Biketastrophy 2011

A collection of shots from the weekend I spent with Aaron Roecker when we went out to Levis/Trow mounds for some epic mountain biking. The levis/trow was a unique experience for us since it is few and far between where you can find a trailhead in wisconsin where they have drive up camping. It is a really nicely put together park in that it is well taken care of however, it should be noted that there are no showers locally. Cold water showers under a faucet are not fun in the least. Enjoy the photo's.

While many of the shots I have are with the sun shining, the sky was mostly overcast and caught us in downpours a few times. It was during this trip that I switched chain lubes from Boeshield, a product that I've used consistantly for the past 2-4 years to Squirt (because it came for free) and ultimately to White Lightning Epic. Once I burn through the White Lightning I will either revert back to the quirt or move on towards Rock n Roll Extreme as I liked the squirt better than the Epic and have heard nothing but good things about the Rock n Roll Blue.

On a tangent.... Boeshield is a paraffin wax based lubricant that is applied (for me, application methods vary) via an aerosol container. The lube that I have had been around for a while so I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not but the performance was extremely poor. During the rain events that occurred while we were out a lot of trail debris, mud, sand, grit was kicked up into the drive. The Paraffin is not supposed to pick this up however the delivery media never seemed to dry/go away and it was holding onto the garbage. In tern, shifting performance suffered greatly on both Aaron and my bike, detracting significantly from the trip. Goodbye Boeshield. And there you have it, bike chain maintenance.

During one evening we ran into a guy named Dennis. Dennis was so slow. But he was also ripped. He was like the fasted laptop ever. With no battery.

The last night we were there some red-headed girl went out for a trail run with her pup. She'd left and a short time later her dog just happened to show up. We waited for a few minutes and no girl so we threw her dog in her pickup and left for our ride.

We'd gotten back to the car after about 2 hrs ride time to discover the little biscuit's truck still there. It was nearly dark out so we discussed what the course of action would be. A few minutes later we struck out in search. Aaron left as a pair with someone we'd met at the trail head and I'd struck out on my own. Being the most experienced night rider I felt pretty confident that I could handle anything that was thrown at me.
I took a hot lap around about a 5 mile section of ski trail towards the east while everyone else headed north. I made it back to learn that red had made it back not 5 minutes earlier. She was very apologetic but I didn't care... either way I got to ride my bike.

Mile after mile of trails that look exactly like this. Enough to keep you on your toes and always wanting more. Given better weather I am sure that we'd have gotten close to 80 miles on the extended weekend- we probably only managed half of that. None the less... it was very good.

During the trip we ran into this guy, I can't remember his name unfortunately. He had a bermise mountain dog puppy that was just too cute. We discovered that he'd arrived essentially a week early in preparation for Gnome fest the following weekend. This guy was a lot of fun to hang around with and was a very good judge of beer. He also let me ride on his pugsly, a bike I would really enjoy owning.