HW RIDES BATCHELOR TO BEND

WOW, Bend left me speechless and tired and busy all at the same time.  I haven't even managed to put up a post on the blog until now. We were so busy riding and enjoying the festivities of Bend Oregon that I failed to post while I was on the road. Enough excuses, here goes.

The Holy Wow Gang arrived in Bend Oregon on Wednesday evening, after a 10 hour journey by truck. We arrived, at our home for the next 4 days, at about 9:00PM. Greeting us on our arrival, were Brett, JT, and Bob along with their Mexican friend Tequi. Tequi commenced to proceed to put the hurt on Brett and Dario, but it did not stop them from answering the ride bell on Thursday morning.

The plan was to take a shuttle to the Mid mountain of Mt. Bachelor and then ride 35 miles of single track back to the city of Bend. The Cog Wild shuttle picked us up at 9:30AM.  Lauren our driver, expertly took us up to our starting point. She then had to wait for a rescue because she left the keys to the van, in the van, and one of us (probably Tequi) pressed the power lock button and locked her out. Hope she didn't get in too much trouble. That Tequi is a real shit disturber.

Off we went on our first ride in Bend. The trail started with a gradual up. It was dusty and there was a bit of smoke in the air from a forest fire near by. The next video should show you what the trail was like.



With the majority of the climbing done, the trail starts to pitch downward. not too steep, in fact you could ajust the speed that you wanted to go just by pedaling. The single track was very sweet. There were many S turns and banked turns that wound their way through the trees. The fun factor was increasing the further we went towards Bend.



I could not believe how uniform this single track was, and it just kept on going and going.  Whoops and hollers could be heard throughout the forest. Tequi was out of the system and the Holy Wow Gang was having a blast.

The whole ride was a sequence of trails that connected together made up the Batchelor to Bend ride. The first trail is called Flagline(it had the climb on it), which connected to Swampy Lakes(lunch spot) that linked to Sector 16(circumnavigate around private land) and then into Whoops.

Whoops was just that, a long series of table tops, gaps and jumps connected together with high speed  banked turns. Very fun. The Contour camera was already full by the time we got to Whoops so the footage below is only the lead up.





Whoops led into Phil's and more jumps and berms. "Is this ever going to end' . We had to do a little map reading to come up with the right connection to make it back to the house.  Marvin Gardens was the pick. Usually a good buy in Monopoly but not so good for the end of a 35 mile day. Just a little too uphill.

On to the highway and a short freewheel exploding pedal(my bike) back to the house.  I needed the equivalent of a bike tow truck to get me back home. The boys pushed me back to wiothin 100 meters of the house. Thanks guys.

Ahh a cool Oregon beer (beer is great in Oregon). A mad search for a free wheel. A burger and then a pedal around Bend in a pedal bar. More about that in my next post.