A week long get away to ride bikes in Squamish, where the trails are many and the nachos are delicious (well, at least the nachos we were making for ourselves in our vacation rental were absolutely wonderful).
After riding in Kamloops on the way over, we started to hit up some of the local Squamish trails.
Sadly I wasn’t feeling super great all week – still recovering from being sick, maybe low on iron? Who knows. But everything felt way harder than it should have done.
Our only group photo, taken at the top of Rupert. It’s a super fun trail which I would have loved to ride again. One of the sad things about road trips is when you’re so busy trying all the trails you often only ever ride favourite trails the one time.
No-one fell in the swamp.
Or fell down the rocky descents (at least on this day).
There were gorgeous views, and scary slabs to ride. And fun slabs to ride.
Bike maintenance was performed in the yard, and we bled my brakes successfully, hurrah!
Half Nelson was one trail we did go back and ride a few times. It was nice to relax with some simple flowy fun after some of the more challenging trails.
It was definitely beautiful riding out there though.
And I may have joined an awesome redheaded green-themed sponsored racing team.
Angry Midgets was a fun trail, but flamingos and disco balls would make any trail great. I feel like there’s a great lack of flamingos and disco balls on most trails these days, and feel like something should be done to address this.
Our vacation rental was gloriously furnished. Who doesn’t love gilt furniture?
In related news, I’m anticipating release of my mountain biking themed glamour calendar in time for Christmas.
We also headed out to Pemberton for a day. Views were spectacular, but we weren’t won over. Maybe we just needed a rest day.
The uphill had many switchbacks. So many. Fine if you’re feeling switched on, not great if you’re feeling a bit tired and not entirely with it. I started to feel demoralised. And then the descent began.
It did not go entirely smoothly. But at least the ride up at Whistler afterwards was great, and the meal and beers at the Whistler Brew Pub afterwards was even better.
Last day had us back in Squamish. A couple of us decided to ride up to Elfin Lakes, on the basis of not looking at the trail report and assuming because it was warm there would be no snow. There was no snow for a few kilometres, then there was more and more snow.
Because we’re both stubborn, we kept going, even though there was no way the snow would clear as we got higher into the alpine. On the plus side, surfing your bike downhill through snow is actually pretty fun. Then it was a long descent on some terrible (Powersmart) and some great (Fred, Half Nelson) trails, to give us a 26km day with 900m of elevation gain, that really felt like it was much longer.
Fun times.