"…Let's Ride"

 My brother Pete and I were out mountain biking on the trails in The Maze (Auburn, NH) one sunny afternoon. We’re tearin’ it up fierce, it had just rained the day before so there’s fresh puddles and mud everywhere along with all the usual fallen trees and trunks and “mini boulders” that dot the trails. There’s quite a few smaller, side trails that loop through the woods and come back to the same trail, some of them are just shortcuts to a different trail, we call these the “fox-trails”. All of which are smaller mountain biking and hiking trails that are only wide enough for single file, there’s no passing and if you’re not on your “A” game, you’re done, you’ll end up a tree-hugger, literally:)

We’re having a great day riding so we decide its time to hit some of these fox-trails. We have a map so we figure one of the shorter ones is best to see what they’re all about.

 We head out on a very easy, very short fox-trail and start to find our groove, dipping and dodging over and around trees. Pete’s in the lead and, we being an experienced riders, kept about 75ft or so between us. This is supposed to be one of the easier ones right? Well, I’m not looking forward to the hard ones then.

This trail is littered with baseball to basketball sized rocks and roots sticking up everywhere, oh those wonderful roots, did I mention the roots. This is how the trail rides for the first 100 yards or so, and thats where it gets rugged(fun). At this point I cannot see Pete on the trail ahead, what I see is a drop off with an “S” turn, half on and half around a car sized boulder and back between two trees about 2ft apart, tight with about a 45 degree downgrade and about 15 total feet long, crazy ridin’. So its “do or die” at this point, I’m going to fast to stop, my knees are scraping the ground, and roots, and……….. didn’t make the turn, I ended up slipping off the last part of the “S” and into some brush. Didn’t wipe-out though.

 I continued on as my adrenaline coursed in my veins now. The trail stayed mellow, at an advanced level for a short time, then back to the rush. I still hadn’t seen Pete but I knew he was ahead. Here we go.

The trail dangerously hooks left, disappears and… a drop off into a hard left turn but…. there’s Pete sprawled out, half conscious, in the middle of the trail, intertwined and tangled in his bike. I have two options now, the trail takes a hard right just beyond his wreck, either I run over Pete and wreck myself into the woods and potentially hurt him more than he already is or, and I only have 1 second to figure this out, I swerve right, hop this fallen and rotten pine tree onto a moss covered piece of ledge five feet down, hop off that ledge, another 5ft or so, land somewhere I can’t see yet, and make my way back to the trail without wiping out. This is the rush that makes me come back for more.

As I’m leaving the ground, I realize I jumped to soon and I’ll never make it over the pine tree. I have to land on the trunk then instantly hop to the ledge, this is gonna be a “sticky lickity-split trick”, especially seeing as how the trunk was not parrelell with my tires, it was at an angle, and rotten.

.

WHAM… My bike hits the trunk, that hurt bad, but the bike stuck and I was able to pull it off.

DOUBLE WHAM…. I hit the ledge with so much force that my rear end came slamming down onto my bike. The crushing force that the impact had on the seat was incredible, breaking the tube clean of and viciously snapped the bolt holding the seat frame together.

Now, from rom hitting the seat the way I did, I got nudged into a backward and downward motion, sending me on back to have an “ up close and personal” with my rear tire, getting my “tight end” throttled by my very rugged back tire, and even though it was just for a second………instant raw spot.

 Now my seat is gone, there’s a four inch jagged piece of pipe sticking out of my frame where it used to be, and I still have another 5ft drop into, what I can now see is a pile of brush. In that split second all I could imagine was me having to be taken out of the woods on a stretcher, seriously mangling myself up on the broken tube and all the brush I was gonna land in. With all the strength and energy I had left coursing through me, I launched as hard as I could and I actually pulled muscles in both legs trying to clear the brush pile and land between some trees just past it.

NO DICE …………I Ate it…… horrendous barreling and flipping through the woods on a sunny afternoon. I at least cleared the brush pile and lined up pretty decent on the tumble as to not hit anything while I was crashing through the woods. I realized in the last split second that I would have to throw the bike aside if I didnt want to get impailed by the broken tube. Thank goodness for brain buckets and the other safety gear I had but I still got banged up pretty good. To top it off, when my seat snapped off, it snapped with so much force that it was ejected into the woods to never be seen again….. we can”t find it anywhere, and it’s still there to this day. We looked for almost an hour that day. We decided then that it was a good time to call it a day, understandably, huh?

 Have you ever rode your mountain bike with no seat? Now try shifting. It was like learning how to ride a mountain bike all over again. We had about a 4 mile ride back to the car but that can seem like an eternity when you’ve got a raw spot (sweat burns like an really bad…. BTW) and no seat for 4 miles of uphill and downhill trails that call for constant shifting. One of my least favorite days.

Bottom line is that we and our bikes were not ready or properly tuned and we should have never tried those trails without checking them out first. We were over confident and it caused great damage to our bikes and it could have caused serious injury to us. You must be properly prepared for the type of riding you’re gonna be doing, your equipment and your body and mind.

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